Product Details

• Actors: Anne Heche, Christopher Walken, Joan Chen, Steven Bauer, Allen Garfield
• Directors: Donald Cammell
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Hallmark
• VHS Release Date: February 25, 1997
• Run Time: 96 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6303974635
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #336,094 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Before Anne Heche came to prominence as the lover (and then ex-lover) of Ellen DeGeneres, she carved out a career as a sharp, intelligent actress, someone who could save a movie by appearing on the fringes, as in The Juror, for instance. Mixed in with supporting roles were a few indie leads--Wild Side is one of the latter, despite Heche's third billing. And a very strange item it is. Heche plays a banking go-getter who moonlights as a high-class call girl, with the movie hinting that the two professions may not be all that dissimilar. A liaison with a crooked financier (Christopher Walken in extremis) and later with his wife (Joan Chen) puts our heroine in a very confusing situation, especially when she gets in the way of a chauffeur/undercover cop/predator, played by Steven Bauer in high Eric Roberts mode. If the story is not always coherent, the actors nevertheless shoot off sparks, and the movie pulses with a weird energy all its own.

Wild Side was the last picture directed by Donald Cammell, whose 1970 film Performance (co-directed by Nicolas Roeg) is one of the defining films of its era. This cut of Wild Side is credited to the pseudonymous "Franklin Brauner" because Cammell was unhappy with the radical re-edit performed without his consent. A director's cut had been prepared, but Cammell did not live to see it. He committed suicide in 1996, leaving behind a very small output of films in his foreshortened career. Wild Side, even in its cut form, carries his signature traits of authentic disorientation and intense, twisted sex. And while it's a guaranteed perk for prurient viewers, the torrid coupling of Heche and Chen is just one equation in the film's convoluted sexual arithmetic. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

75 of 77 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Beware!, April 27, 2005

By 

Who Fanatic (Morgantown, WV) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Wild Side (DVD)

Those of you hoping to track down the director's version of this film, don't get your hopes up with the "unrated" listing among the technical specifications. This is still the 95 minute R-rated rush-release, it just doesn't list it on the packaging. The director's cut (apparently available only in Region 2) runs 111 minutes.

56 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars NOT THE DIRECTOR'S CUT; DO NOT BUY THIS JUNK, August 3, 2001

By 

TUCO H. "H. TUCO" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wild Side (DVD)

How DISGUSTING that this film has been put out in its awful BUTCHERED version, the one Donald Cammell took his name off, just to capitalize on the recent big public Lesbian love-affair of Anne Heche and Ellen De Generais. This is the version that has been showing up on lists of the worst films ever made, BOMBS, etc., and needs to be thrown on the trash heap where it belongs. And if that weren't enough of a disgrace and insult to Cammell's artistic vision, the Full-Screen Only specification should clue you in to what kind of charlatans you're dealing with here. You should know for your own good that people are just trying to take your money and run when they offer only a full-screen version on a DVD!

Fortunately, through the efforts of some of Cammell's friends we now have the original version which should be put out on a good DVD as soon as possible. In fact, I just saw (at the American Cinemateque in Hollywood)a pristine print of that ORIGINAL DIRECTOR'S CUT, meticulously reconstructed by Frank Mazzolla, Cammell's editor, from detailed notes Cammell left right before he shot himself, and was COMPLETELY BLOWN AWAY by it (no pun intended). I haven't laughed so hard and been thoroughly fascinated at the same time for a long, long time. The great, very long, leisurely paced and quite erotic Lesbian scene between Anne Heche and Joan Chen is maybe the least of the original film's virtues. Cammell's vision seamlessly puts together amazing cinematography, hilarious farce, off-kilter dialogue that goes everywhere you don't expect it to, virtuoso editing, and above all, the semi-improvised performances of their careers from the three main leads (Anne Heche, Christopher Walken, Steven Bauer), into a near-masterpiece that only a talentless producer could've ever turned into a 'bomb,' a film, that in the final analysis, can hold its own against "Performance," and "White of the Eye" (the two mind-blowers that made Cammell a living legend, albeit one who couldn't find work!).

You might ask who's Steven Bauer? Steven Bauer is the guy who's mostly known for having played Al Pacino/Tony Montana's brother in De Palma's "Scarface." Now you know EXACTLY who he is, because he was so excellent in "Scarface" that people always wonder what happened to the guy! Well, he's done quite a lot of mediocre stuff just to keep working, but when given the chance, as here, under Cammell's direction, he's done truly exceptional work. The scene where Bauer has to 'bend over' to prove his loyalty to Christopher Walken and has his underwear torn off, with a non-chalant Anne Heche in the room amused by the goings-ons, is maybe one of the two or three most hilarious, daring, pulling-out-all-the-stops, semi-improvised virtuoso acting scenes in recent cinematic memory. This film will yet have its day!

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Wild Side, February 27, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Wild Side (DVD)

The only edition available on DVD is apparently the R-rated one which does not contain the hot scene with Heche and Chen.