There are bad movies. There are bad erotic thrillers. And then there’s Acting on Impulse—a film so unsure of itself it tries to be a satire, a murder mystery, a skin flick, and a psychological drama, and fails in every category like it’s going for a world record in mediocrity.
Starring Linda Fiorentino as Susan Gittes, a softcore film actress trying to escape her sleazy Hollywood image, this movie desperately wants to be clever. It wants to be Body Heat with brains, Basic Instinct with meta-commentary, and ends up being the cinematic equivalent of a bar napkin with lipstick, bad poetry, and a restraining order scribbled on it.
Susan’s on the run from her career, her fame, and her own script choices, apparently. She holes up in a resort that feels like someone turned a Sandals brochure into a hostage situation. There, she meets Paul, played by C. Thomas Howell, a guy who looks like he got rejected from the local writer’s workshop for being too emotionally unstable. Paul’s into Susan—not because she’s smart, funny, or interesting, but because she’s Linda Fiorentino and he saw her topless in something once.
And thus begins their psychological “cat and mouse” game, which has all the tension of a half-inflated beach ball. They flirt. They argue. They shower—separately, together, emotionally, spiritually. If you thought the movie might do anything but slowly circle around the idea of maybe having a plot, you’re in for a long, moist ride.
The twist? There’s a murder. Maybe. Kind of. It’s hazy. A character dies. There’s blood. There’s a weapon. But instead of diving into an investigation, the movie just kind of shrugs and goes, “Well, guess it’s time for another vaguely erotic flashback.”
Nancy Allen shows up as an undercover cop—dressed like a dominatrix at a PTA meeting—who’s on the trail of the killer, or the stalker, or maybe just hoping to find a better movie. She snoops around, delivers every line like she’s reading a warning label on a curling iron, and seems visibly annoyed that she’s not in a Robocop sequel instead.
The film tries to be meta. Susan talks about the way people objectify her. There are moments where it teases being a satire of the erotic thriller genre—ha ha, see, we know these kinds of movies are dumb! But just because you point at the garbage while rolling in it doesn’t make it art. That’s not deconstruction—it’s just wallowing with subtitles.
And the tone? Oh, it’s all over the map. One scene it’s noir. The next it’s screwball comedy with awkward boner energy. Then it veers into slow-motion shower monologues and dream sequences that look like they were shot in a fog machine factory on clearance day.
The dialogue? Imagine a horny teenager trying to write Vertigo after drinking too much Mountain Dew. “You don’t know the real me,” Susan whispers, probably while naked. “I’m not acting this time,” Paul mutters, halfway between seduction and an anxiety attack. Everyone talks like they’re doing voiceovers for their own paperback thriller that got rejected by Harlequin.
Fiorentino, to her credit, tries. She really does. She oozes screen presence, glides through the wreckage with those heavy-lidded eyes and that “I’m smarter than this” energy that both elevates and mocks the entire film. She’s too good for this material—and you can feel her realizing that somewhere around page 23 of the script. Her character, Susan Gittes, is supposed to be damaged, hunted, sexual, and dangerous. What she ends up being is a tragic commentary on wasted talent surrounded by clowns.
C. Thomas Howell? God bless him. He spends most of the film with the expression of a man who just woke up in a stranger’s hot tub. His performance ranges from wooden to damp. He’s supposed to be charmingly unhinged, but mostly he looks like he gets winded walking up stairs and keeps his poetry in a glove box.
And Nancy Allen, caught in the crossfire, just kind of stares at everyone like she’s counting the hours until she can go home and scrub this movie off with sandpaper.
Final Verdict:
Acting on Impulse is a sleazy, soggy mess dressed up in noir drag and pretending it’s clever. It’s not sexy, not smart, and not suspenseful. It’s a low-budget, slow-motion trainwreck of exposed thighs, whispered threats, and plot holes the size of a jacuzzi.
1 out of 5 stars.
One star for Linda Fiorentino, who could deliver Shakespeare or sell mouthwash and still make it look cool. The rest? Acting on impulse is what got this movie made. Watching it should require a ten-day cooling-off period.
