Inner Sanctum movies and it sort of starts like that,” he told Draculina.
“I wanted it to be like the old Lon Chaney Jr. By and large a slow-burning drama, Ray allows Inner Sanctum’s story to steadily unfold before going hell for leather in a slasher-tinged closing stretch that both calls to mind the helmer’s Haunting Fear (1990)and brings the themes of spousal abuse and murder within Mark Thomas McGee’s compact screenplay to a satisfying, if somewhat logically flawed, close.Īs early as 1992, Ray was voicing his annoyance at how Inner Sanctum turned out, and what it was like toiling with the notoriously difficult Roberts. From an ogling perspective, the former Charlie’s Angel looks suitably celestial in her protracted scenes of horizontal dancing, and Ray keeps us guessing just which side of Baxter and Jennifer’s domestic conflict Lynn belongs to - if, indeed, any - with wit and style.
Hired by the philandering Baxter Reed (Bottoms) to care for his disabled wife, Jennifer (Valerie Wildman), Lynn - Roberts’ slinky nurse - is a brilliant character. Still, there are plenty of positives to atone for such missteps. It’s also stricken with a pair of unconvincing performances: one from Joseph Bottoms as an abusive hubby, another from Margaux Hemingway as Bottoms’ other woman. It’s not perfect: as with Mundhra’s opus, Inner Sanctum feels like the work of a director not yet completely comfortable with his material - though with Ray having expressed distaste for the erotic thriller trend in the years since, it’s a criticism that could be levelled at the bulk of the B-auteur’s more salacious output. While as interesting as Night Eyes in terms of the place it occupies within the erotic thriller’s cassette-based evolution (frequent Ray collaborator Jim Wynorski, for instance, cites it as a key influence on his own raunchy epics), Inner Sanctum is the better film. “It was on the front of the Wall Street Journal, and it out-rented Backdraft (1991). “Inner Sanctum was extremely successful,” says Ray.
Starring Night Eyes’ Tanya Roberts and released on tape fourteen months after Mundhra’s saucy trendsetter, Inner Sanctum was made for a paltry $650,000 and clawed in millions, becoming a blockbuster for distributor RCA Columbia Pictures Home Video. If the late, great Jag Mundhra’s Night Eyes (1990) was ground zero for the straight-to-video erotic thriller, then Fred Olen Ray’s INNER SANCTUM (1991) is the film that cemented the subgenre’s financial viability. Featuring commentary by the B-movie titan himself, Matty profiles the first four erotic thrillers directed by the mighty Fred Olen Ray.
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