...steamy, tawdry, gloriously over-the-top...

| Aug 1, 2024

A potboiler on class woes, Wild Things is the dark fruit at the end of a neo-noir era in the 1990s, where softcore sensibilities were an acceptable selling point and adult themes embraced.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 27, 2023

McNaughton and cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball frequently cut to glimpses of alligators lurking in the Florida swamps, echoing the predatory nature of virtually every main character.

| Jun 9, 2023

Older noirs often present that failure of hierarchy as a crisis. But in Wild Things, it’s exhilarating.

| Mar 28, 2023

Lurid, trashy, and shockingly intelligent, Wild Things will surprise you like few films can.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 21, 2023

Director John McNaughton's grip is a bawdy mix of suspense, sex and silliness, all served up with a huge tongue sticking in his cheek. It's a foamy mix, topped off by highly charged performances.

| Feb 2, 2023

Blending the superheated emotions of Douglas Sirk with the soft-porn high-jinks of Russ Meyer, the result is steamy, ludicrous and very entertaining.

| Feb 2, 2023

In a perfect world, all bad movies would be as outrageously entertaining as Wild Things, a delirious wallow in sunbaked sleaze that revels in its own awfulness.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 2, 2023

A lurid exploitation film disguised as a guessing game, Wild Things offers an opportunity to see reasonably respectable actors go slumming in swampy South Florida.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Feb 2, 2023

In the universe of Wild Things, innocence is a particularly lethal demon -- if it doesn't get you killed, it becomes too expensive to hang on to. To play this theme for such delicious, wicked laughs is a mark of true imaginative intelligence.

| Feb 2, 2023

Is there more to Wild Things than the trash? Sure, but not much more: Frankly, it’s the trash that holds the film together.

| Feb 2, 2023

Wild Things isn't a first-rate crime story. But it is a kicky little B-thriller and just the thing for a night of slumming.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2023

In acknowledging its absurdity, McNaughton gets to make an exploitation movie and rise above it all at once.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 2, 2023

The entire cast is up to the task, and McNaughton plays them, and the audience, like a piano. He even turns the film's flaws into advantages, making them seem like part of the joke.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 2, 2023

Wild Things is the kind of movie that gives gratuitous sex and violence a good name.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 2, 2023

This film has put a little originality to the suspense genre in the same manner as the two Scream movies have done for horror.

| Feb 2, 2023

Smooth, cheap exploitation flicks slake our thirst for smut as fully as great films sate our taste for the sublime. The new master of the craft may be John McNaughton.

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 2, 2023

A sexy, darkly comedic suspense thriller that seems to be making fun of suspense thrillers.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 2, 2023

Beneath its unassuming title hides a movie that is a mixture of film noir and dry comedy, and turns out to be very surprising, very nasty and very, very entertaining.

| Feb 2, 2023

It's cheerful swill. If you're anything like me, don't tell me that some small part of you didn't have a lowdown good time.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 2, 2023