COLD SWEAT (1993)
Article 5117 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-25-2016
Directed by Gail Harvey
Featuring Ben Cross, Adam Baldwin, Shannon Tweed
Country: Canada
What it is: Erotic thriller

A frustrated businessman hires a hit man to knock off a business associate that is having an affair with his wife. Things go awry.

I tend to look askance at any movie classified as an “erotic thriller”; for every one of them that does something interesting with the concept (THE FOURTH MAN, for example), there are about ten others which are little more than variations of “I slept with a psycho” or ordinary thrillers with a lot of sex slathered on. This is one of the latter; it’s mostly “love triangle” type of thriller with an extra point, as the wife of the businessman is messing around with TWO other men rather than just one. One interesting touch is that the businessman is played by comic actor Dave Thomas from SCTV, and if he doesn’t quite succeed in the role of the movie as it is, it does give me a hint of as to how this movie would have worked better, and that is if it had fully gone the distance and become an out-and-out comedy. The plot is so ridiculous that it’s halfway there already. This brings us to the weirdest plot element and the one that provides the fantastic content; the hit man is haunted by the ghost of a female victim who became an inadvertent witness to his last hit. This serves as only a subplot to the main story line, and I myself would have rather seen the movie in which this was the main plot element. However, that plot wouldn’t have had all the gratuitous sex of the one the movie chose, so it wouldn’t have been an “erotic thriller”. After all, I’m sure the makers of the movie knew what they wanted.