Did I say something about Bruce Willis?If you've been keeping up with the blog, you know I've watched three Bruce Willis movies in the past month, and written about each. Friday night would have been the fourth, totally unwittingly -- as in, I didn't realize it was another Bruce Willis movie until after I'd already decided to watch it. The Sixth Sense had been mentioned on one of my podcasts this week, and that gave me a hankering to catch up with it for the first time in at least 15 years. Alas, it was not available on either of my streaming services, and I didn't want to watch it enough to pay for it.
While looking for it, though, I did notice something extremely funny in the search results of my Australian streaming service, Stan.
The Sixth Sense is, quite obviously, not an erotic thriller. But it is a thriller, so I guess that triggered a number of erotic thrillers lurking around in Stan's database on the search algorithm. Better to provide you irrelevant results than no results at all.
I couldn't help but laugh at those results, which, on the second row, looked like this:
A five-poster wide image isn't great for the blog layout, which is why I've excerpted two of these posters for the artwork above.
Looking at these five posters side by side, it reminded me how similar the marketing campaigns for erotic thrillers used to be -- and how basically gone from the landscape that marketing approach is now. If you saw a poster like this in the lobby of your local multiplex in 2020 -- assuming it was open, of course -- you'd get a good laugh at it. It would be too cheesy by half.
But in the years 1987 to 2004 -- which covers the range of release dates for these movies -- these posters were plentiful. So plentiful, in fact, that a search for a fairly different type of movie could bring up a random swath of these posters and have them be almost identical to one another.
In a full three of these posters, the man is plunging his mouth deep into the neck of the woman, though in two of them she is looking elsewhere. The two others are perhaps the more suggestive, as both parties appear to be naked in the Indecent Proposal poster, while Josh Hartnett might just be doing the "lift and fuck" in Wicker Park.
The other similarities are rather funny as well. Three of these have sensationalist two-word titles -- a kind of platonic ideal for the erotic thriller -- which could probably be used interchangeably for each other without compromising one iota their ability to describe the plot. The other two? Place names.
I don't have any good way to search it, but I wonder how many other movies made during this period have a poster that's almost identical to these. There could literally be hundreds. Of course, if a five-panel wide image doesn't work very well on a blog, neither does one that goes a hundred across.
Rather disappointingly, when you search for any of these other titles individually instead of The Sixth Sense, the results are less satisfying. Some of these pick each other up, but none of them pick up all five in a row the way The Sixth Sense does.
Of course, if I did actually want to choose a Bruce Willis movie, I'd have my options there as well:
Not streaming though, unfortunately.
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