Body of Evidence

Whatever aims Uli (Last Exit to Brooklyn) Edel set out with, this turned into a tributary to Sex as soon as Madonna came aboard. She plays a dominatrix, and what she gets up to with her defence attorney (Dafoe) is what will pull audiences, rather than the courtroom debate. As a child, she confides, she observed that the strawberries one had to wade through thorns to reach were the sweetest, after which she introduces Dafoe to SM. Enumerating these strawberries, we get the following. She drips hot candle-wax on to his body, registering a consensual moment before dripping it on to his dick. She rummages in his flies in a crowded lift. He muff-dives her in an underground car park. She has a wank. There's bondage, buggery, and a clothes-ripping chase up the stairs. Apart from that, there's a bit of verbal back-and-forth in court between the DA (Mantegna) and defence about whether she used her body as a lethal weapon to kill her millionaire lover and inherit; a brace of shifty witnesses (Archer and Prochnow); no tension; and Portland, Oregon in the rain.