“Crimes of Passion” review — Kathleen Turner is mesmerising in cult sex shocker

★★★★☆ Ken Russell’s unloved transgressive classic deserves critical reappraisal.

“I met this woman, Joanna… she took me in her arms and she said, “It’s okay to be scared.”

I felt stronger…and freer…and more like a man than I’ve ever felt before in my life.

Then we fucked our brains out.”

This kind of beautiful contradiction lies at the heart of Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion. A lurid erotic thriller featuring a mesmerising Kathleen Turner performance, the film was savaged by censors, rejected by critics, and largely ignored by audiences, failing to earn back its modest budget on release in 1984.

To this day the film’s reception remains pitifully low, a 48% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes betraying what I believe to be an unfairly dismissed work of transgressive art. It’s perverted and, at times, hard to truly grasp all its ideas. But there is also beauty in its often challenging content. Crimes of Passion deserves a second chance.

Parading seductively on a grubby, neon-drenched sidewalk is China Blue (Turner), a high-end fashion designer by day and equally high-end prostitute come night. Blue is in constant demand, a woman committed to the art of pleasurable transactions; a wide-eyed sexual savant, eager and willing to fulfil her clients’ desires. Any desire.

But the lines between her worlds begin to blur as she finds herself caught in an increasingly demented ménage à trois involving Bobby, a sweet but sexually frustrated family man (John Laughlin), and Peter (Anthony Perkins), a psychotic priest who believes he, as well as his killer chrome dildo, is the key to Blue’s eternal salvation.

Viewed through the lens of eighties sensibility it’s easy to see why the film courted such controversy. It features sex, violence and, sometimes, a combination of both to near-pornographic extremes. One scene, a frenetic tryst involving Blue, an (presumably) off-duty police officer, and his truncheon — no double entendres here, his ACTUAL police baton, caused such a fuss Russell was forced to cut it completely from its theatrical release.

Their loss I guess.

As the talented sexual facilitator China Blue, Kathleen Turner (Serial Mom, The Virgin Suicides) is exceptional, particularly when wearing the distinctive blonde wig that separates her two sharply contrasting lives. Her dialogue, filled with an endless slew of witty and sexually charged puns, is intoxicatingly seductive and a lot fun to listen to.

Despite being a film that presents itself as a simple piece of dirty erotica, it’s surprisingly dense with ideas. Some ideas around gender roles, marital expectations, consumerism and America’s moralistic malaise, work pretty well if only explored briefly at the surface level.

Others, mostly related to the film’s unhinged religious character, went over my head with increasing and frustrating regularity. Take nothing away from Anthony Perkins’ (Psycho) performance, however. That man had the deranged, lost soul part nailed down.

Crimes of Passion gleefully straddles the line between good and bad taste. It’s simultaneously grotty and gorgeous, soft and sharp, elegant and blunt.

Like any movie, it all boils down to preference. I have a deep and lifelong love of movies that challenge me — just ask my therapist. If you, like me, share an odd passion for extreme graphic content or ideas that test the status quo, this smutty and sophisticated number is a testing pleasure well worth seeking out.

As I post this it literally just hit me that Perkins’ priest character could’ve been a commentary on the tragedy of sexual repression, specifically homosexuality in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. That would go a long way in explaining the character’s rampant misogyny, and wielding of a deadly phallic object as a tool of both salvation and devastation.

Maybe.

God, I love movies. Always learning.