On Tubi this week, I watched The Hot Spot, a 1990 noir film directed by Dennis Hopper and starring Don Johnson as a drifter named Harry who ends up in a small Texan town, being seduced by his boss’s vixen wife Dolly (Virginia Madsen) and pursuing a local girl just barely out of her teens, Gloria (Jennifer Connolly), and is set on robbing the bank, but ends up getting involved in twisted plots of sex and blackmail and deception.
I really liked this. It had a good steamy, late 80s neo-noir vibe to it, Virginia Madsen seemed to be having a lot of fun putting on a whole Southern Belle accent while being incredible obvious about seducing Harry, and, like my friend Bill Scurry said in his review, the movie both plays to the male and female gazes, sexually objectifying Madsen, Johnson, and Connolly.
William Sadler is fun to watch as a local sleazy dirtbag who keeps bugging Gloria for later revealed reasons, and Connolly was still very young at the time, but had this look where she could look demure and studious, then walk out in a bikini in the water like an Ursula Andress moment.
I also liked that the movie subverted some tropes of the noir film, like how Harry refuses to be duped into killing Dolly’s husband or go with her scheming, and that Dolly survives at the end instead of being killed as a punishment. It felt interesting to watch, if a little muddled at times with two plots going on that try to come together at the end. But the cast worked well (other people considered for the movie were Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Debra Winger, and Uma Thurman, and I can see them working well too), and I liked watching it.
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