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Poison Ivy: The New Seduction

Jaime Pressly follows in the dysfunctional footsteps of Drew Barrymore and Alyssa Milano in this 1997 direct-to-video franchise-ender. I guess there were no more chicks named after flowers who needed to work out Daddy issues. This one is kind of connected to the first one; in the opening sequence, we meet Ivy (Drew in the original) and her sister Violet as little girls. Their mom is the live-in housekeeper of rich Ivan Greer (Michael Des Barres), and is sleeping with both him and the pool guy. He finds out and gives her the boot, even though he himself is guilty of cheating on his wife with her. Ivy and Violet disappear, separated from Violet's BFF Joy, the little daughter of Ivan.

Flash forward eleven years. Violet (Jaime) is now a blonde bombshell with an ass that leads men to their doom. She shows up at La Casa Greer, ostensibly because she's in town going to college and she wants to reconnect with Joy (Megan Edwards, so bad an actress that she couldn't convey gravity if she fell off a cliff). In short order Violet, who says she's waitressing at Denny's (heh, not in that dominatrix get-up), proceeds to destroy everyone's life in revenge for what Ivan did to her mom. It's the kind of movie where Violet is so diabolical she knows everyone's weakness and capitalizes on them in a way you thankfully only see in Skinemax flicks like this. She seduces Joy's rich ex-druggie boyfriend and gets him into cocaine again. She seduces Ivan. She even makes Joy's female tennis partner think that they slept together in a drunken haze. She doesn't seduce Joy — this isn't that kind of flick.

Did I mention that cult-movie veteran Susan Tyrrell is in it? She plays Ivan's terminally sour-faced new housekeeper, who pegs Violet as a dangerous skank the minute she lays eyes on her. I was with the film as a kind of nasty class-warfare revenge fantasy — white-trash Violet wading into the upper class and drawing blood — until the maid got killed. The maid had nothing to do with hurting Violet's mom; neither did Joy. (Neither did Joy's boyfriend, for that matter, but he's kind of presented as scummy anyway, as are his snooty Ivy League friends.) So Violet turns into a vindictive psycho willing to kill anyone who gets in her way. The possible class message gets lost and Jaime Pressly is left with little to play but cold calculation. There's a twisted tea party at the end that gestures towards some sort of damaged humanity within Violet, but by then it's too late. The message of the movie then becomes that you can't trust people from the lower class; don't take them into your home or they'll fuck up your life. It's a bit sour and confused, given that the script actually does try to lay groundwork for something at least a tiny bit more thoughtful. (When Violet killed the maid, I thought Hellooo? Violet? Your mom was a maid too. But this isn't the kind of movie to suggest that Violet is acting out some sort of kill-my-mother, fuck-my-father Freudian thing.)

The previous Poison Ivy films were directed by women; this one was helmed by Kurt Voss, a one-time collaborator of indie-film director Allison (Gas Food Lodging) Anders (they co-directed their first film together, and also co-made 1999's Sugar Town). The difference appears to be an overabundance of male-gaze fantasy: not one but two nude-swimming scenes, a bit with Violet pouring expensive wine over her breasts, etc. I remember the other directors (Katt Shea Ruben and Anne Goursaud, respectively) showing a bit of a sense of humor about their protagonists' Lolita-esque vagina dentata powers; Voss and his movie seem afraid of Violet, though the structure of the film seems to point to our identifying with her pain. I think the tension between tone and structure was what made me uneasy. I identified with Joy, who never hurt anyone. In the other two movies you knew that Drew and Alyssa were fucked up, but they weren't presented as the diabolical puppetmasters that Jaime is. On a personal level, I should note that I've seen firsthand in real life what one motivated skank can do to a previously happy household, so perhaps I can't find this sort of thing as amusing as I used to.

I can't really judge Jaime's performance, since most of it depends on her physique. I am reliably informed that she has shown comedic gifts in various subsequent movies and currently on My Name Is Earl. She shows a bit of that here, in various snarky dialogue readings. But the camera is sometimes cruel to her; in some shots she's lighted to look somewhat piggish. That's your clue that Voss isn't really into the material. I didn't find myself enjoying the revenge fantasy because the visual and emotional cues nudged me towards resenting Violet for messing up rich people's lives — a position I didn't care to be in. The movie is just garbled. I couldn't help wondering what Allison Anders would've done with the same material; she would've made everyone human and brought out the tragedy of the story.

Is it enjoyable for its very sub-Fatal Attraction badness? Conceivably, yes. There are harder-on-the-eyes things to watch than Jaime Pressly in various stages of undress. Former Power Station frontman Michael Des Barres (whose ex-wife Pamela wrote about her groupie exploits in I'm With the Band) reminded me of a dessicated Rupert Giles, and his performance (especially when he's confronted with full frontal Jaime and looks absolutely stricken) is more sympathetic than the script probably intended. But in all, this is an unnecessary second sequel to a pretty good movie that didn't even call for one sequel.