The Cool Surface (1994)

I've been trying to give a balanced appraisal of these failed films from the 80s and 90s, but it would be a stretch to come up with a second good thing about this film.

The first of the film's strengths is, of course, easy to identify -  a young, ripe Teri Hatcher took off her top in two scenes.

The basic storyline here had some potential. A socially inept writer has been in seclusion, working on his masterpiece for years. He is told by his agent that the manuscript is brilliant, but totally unmarketable. The writer is sent back out to write something that people will actually pay to read. But what? He finds his inspiration in the apartment next door, where his actress neighbor is having constant rows with her lover. The neighbor's arguments get so violent that the writer finally screws up his courage and bursts in on them gallantly - only to find out that the "lover" is just another actor rehearsing a scene with her. The writer is mortified at having made a total fool of himself, but after due consideration determines that he finally has an anecdote worth repeating. He ends up having a wild affair with the sexy, drop-dead-gorgeous actress, and puts almost every word of their bedroom talk into his new novel. The book turns out to be a real potboiler, and his agent is so thrilled with it that he is able to sell it to Hollywood as a movie treatment.

The actress/girlfriend, of course, figures out that she would be pretty damned good in the lead role since the entire story is about her life. She goes after the role, and gets it.

Up until that point, The Cool Surface had been merely mediocre. It was an erotic thriller with mild, listless erotica and no thrills, but it was not a complete write-off. Teri Hatcher was tres sexy, and it was kind of interesting to see Robert Patrick playing a nerdy writer with long hair and granny glasses, looking for all the world like John Lennon. After the girlfriend is cast to play herself, however, the script just wanders off into all sorts of surreal directions. It suddenly develops a bunch of thrills, albeit bizarre ones, but the plotline is virtually incoherent, and none of the characters' motivations seem to make sense. For some reason, the writer is really pissed off that his actress/girlfriend wants to play the part of the actress/girlfriend in the movie (I never did understand why) and he goes totally ballistic. He starts throwing tantrums, beating his girlfriend up, assaulting her friends, drinking too much, and writing a sequel to show what a monster she is. Meanwhile, she keeps saying, "What? I love you. I haven't hurt you in any way. Things are great between us. Why are you doing this?" He doesn't have any explanation. His irrational behavior is as irritating and inexplicable to the audience as to the girlfriend, and that alone is close to a deal-breaker, but the straw that breaks the camel's back is that the script stars mixing up the scenes which he imagines in his sequel novel with the things which are happening in reality, to the point where nothing seems real, even though some things are supposed to be.

Maybe.

I guess.

Anyway, the second half of this movie is incoherent and completely irritating. The ending is a surprise, but a very unpleasant one. To make matters worse, Teri Hatcher leaves her clothes on during the entire second half. After the first 45 minutes I got so bored with this movie that I could only struggle through it by taking breaks every ten minutes, and even then I kept saying out loud, to no one in particular, "God, this sucks."