Taglines: Ignore her, and she’ll never go away.
Malicious movie storyline. A medical student, obsessed with her school’s star baseball player, pursues him and finally manages to get him to spend the weekend with her. However, when he soon returns to his girlfriend, her anger at his “betrayal” causes her to go over the edge and places both her ex-lover’s and his girlfriend’s lives in danger.
Malicious is a 1995 Canadian-American erotic thriller film starring Molly Ringwald and Patrick McGaw. The plot follows a star college baseball player (McGaw) who has a fling with a disturbed medical student (Ringwald) who begins to stalk him. The film’s main character has been discussed by psychiatrists and film experts, and has been used as a film illustration for the psychiatric entity known as borderline personality disorder.
Film Review for Malicious
Generally movie critics think it is a good thing when a film is ‘ambitious,’ but I argue it’s a bad thing with Malicious. The movie was made for only two explicit reasons: 1) to be a Fatal Attraction for a younger, “hiper” audience (God help us all), and 2) to show Molly Ringwald’s naked breasts. This film does indeed deliver on both promises, but it feels obliged to become even more offensive than Fatal Attraction ever was.
The Michael Douglas of this movie is named, well, Doug (coincidence?), a college student whose main ambition in life is to be a professional baseball player. Five minutes in, we’re introduced to his fiance Laura, one of the most irritating, spineless, and downright wimpy film “heroines” in the history of cinema. Meeting Doug in a university library, the duo start making out.
Now, both Laura and Doug are very attractive young people so the whole sight isn’t at all unpleasant to the eyes. The ears, however…let’s just say the dialogue here is about as sexually charged as an episode of “Matlock” and this is a problem the movie doesn’t shake. That’s not to say that the bulk of the acting here is necessarily awful, but to call it ‘uninspired’ is an understatement.
My initial impression was that this was going to be a generally harmless movie: boring and dumb, but not aggressively so. Unfortunately, the movie quickly realizes this weakness and tries to make itself memorable (well, beyond having a naked Molly Ringwald) by trying to invoke the audience’s eternal hatred.
Poor, insipid Laura announces to Doug her intention to go to San Francisco to interview for some kind of post-graduate program (she’s just telling him about this that night?). He badgers her for some sex right then and there, but she declines, being too uptight and Concerned About Her Career to submit to Doug’s perfectly natural and reasonable request to screw in a public space. Poor Doug, eh? No wonder he’s going to run off into the arms of another woman…
…and, minutes later, we see Doug at a party where he’s accosted by Molly Ringwald’s character, Melissa, who, even without knowing anything about the movie beforehand, we know is going to be our psycho-chick because a) she’s sexually aggressive, b) dressed entirely in black, and c) ominously smokes a cigarrette (she does this a lot in the course of the movie, by the way, giving a more obnoxious anti-smoking message than even those damn Truth.com commercials). Doug is supposedly drunk (the dialogue suggests it, but the acting is so dry it’s impossible to tell if he’s actually meant to be) so Molly easily lures him into her car. After some more trying-hard-to-be-erotic-and-failing dialogue, we see them having sex in the car parked in the middle of a baseball field.
Let me stop for a minute to say that really the only thing this movie begins to excel in is its sex scenes, which are fairly well-done, at least with the usual limitations of a film with this rating and compared to what passes for sexy dialogue here. Plus Doug and Melissa are good-looking, so that naturally contributes to the audience’s enjoyment, whatever your intentions with this film. Unfortunately, there’s only two such scenes in this movie and they’re comparatively short, so you’d have to be quite desperate, bored, or very attracted to Molly Ringwald or Patrick McGaw (Doug) to rent Malicious for that reason alone.
Anyhow, Doug is reasonably distressed, and becomes even more so when he discovers that Melissa just happens to be a T.A. under one of his professors (which, since he’s been taking the class for a while, he should have already realized…honestly, this movie doesn’t flaunt enough sex to make this kind of plot hole excusable.) Even though he continuously whines about his current relationship, he accepts Melissa’s offer to tutor him.
This leads to Melissa, who is actually quite wealthy, taking Doug out for a ride on her yacht where he…has sex with her again. In true Fatal Attraction tradition, Doug ends up dumping Melissa the minute his girlfriend gets back in town and, of course, despite coming across as a complete jackass, the audience is supposed to see Doug’s actions as slightly misguided, at best.
Malicious (1995)
Directed by: Ian Corson
Starring: Molly Ringwald, John Vernon, Patrick McGaw, Mimi Kuzyk, Sarah Lassez, Rick Henrickson, Jennifer Copping, Stephen E. Miller, Marlene Worrall, Judith Maxie
Screenplay by: Raul Inglis, George Saunders
Production Design by: Marian Wihak
Cinematography by: Michael Slovis
Film Editing by: Richard Martin
Costume Design by: Druh Ireland
Set Decoration by: Steph Watts
Art Direction by: Lisa Lev
Music by: Graeme Coleman
Distributed by: Republic Pictures
Release Date: November 7, 1995
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