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

| Aug 1, 2024

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

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

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

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 collision of epically awful thespianism. It's like watching particles of antimatter crashing into each other: mutual annihilation on a massive scale.

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

Parts of Wild Things were groovy, but it fell way short of making my heart sing.

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

McNaughton wildly exaggerates the lustfulness and greediness of his characters, and the picture loses that one grain of credibility it needs to function as an involving tale, rather than a camp spectacle.

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

Director John McNaughton keeps things hypnotically absorbing, although sooner or later you realize you're watching glossy Hollywood chess, where flavorful character gives way to the feel of dots being connected.

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

Wild Things has such a complex story, and it forces so many shifts of viewpoint, that it begins to seem artificial, a stunt. And, when all its mysteries are revealed, the movie doesn't really parse or make sense. I felt cheated.

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

Murray somehow picks the film up, briskly tucks it into his pocket and walks away with it.

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

The Stephen Peters script is twisty but vacant of character, and John McNaughton's direction is coarse, slapdash, without the saving spark of low art or high camp.

| Feb 2, 2023

Wild Things is a richly enjoyable piece of hokum that blends camp humor and low melodrama with mind-boggling plot moves of Dario Argento and the structural cleverness of Quentin Tarantino.

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

Throughout all the devious twists and turns of the plot, McNaughton keeps the temperature on the boil, with a directorial style that's firmly over the top, deliberately and joyously melodramatic.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 2, 2023

A potent exercise in pathological trashiness from John McNaughton, the director of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, who surveys his ripe Florida locations with a master satirist's glee.

| Feb 2, 2023