L'ombra del peccato

This film has a few things going for it and not much else. It does have an icy female villain well played by one Anne Twomey, who is now known only for her small part as the NBC exec who put the kibosh on Jerry's sitcom pilot on Seinfeld. It has the sexiness of Tom Berenger and Daphne Zuniga, but doesn't seem to know what to do with them. And it has brief full-frontal male nudity by an unknown actor at the beginning, worth a look alone since it happens so rarely in American films.

That's it. The rest is not good, but it may be fun to watch just to see how convoluted it gets. Plus you keep thinking the main actors are going to bare all, but they never really do. (Zuniga gets some rear shots, but is pretty skillful at arm-placement when facing the camera. If you wanna see more of Berenger, get At Play in the Fields of the Lord instead.) Sorry to keep dwelling on the nudity, but this is not a film you watch for the plot.

Roger Ebert named this as the worst film of 1988 six weeks before the year was up. I don't think it's that bad, but it tests your patience. Funny, he ran into Zuniga at Sundance about 13 years later and they exchanged pleasantries. Apparently he was kinder to her in other reviews. She has deserved better, and in fact could be having a Helen Hunt kinda career if she hadn't been cast in films like this. (Being on Melrose Place probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but not in retrospect.)

You can decide for yourself if this film is "so bad it's good" or just bad. Perhaps it might have been a great cheap Cinemax "erotic thriller" with a controversial priest angle, but at face value it's lame, with a lousy written tough-guy priest character that rings false all the way through it. If you want to see a story about a morally compromised priest, see Linus Roache in the excellent PRIEST, not this.

To sum up, I was curious about this film, and I'm glad I watched it, but I probably would not watch it again. (Did I just qualify that with a 'probably'?)