The Hot Spot is best known to lecherous film buffs for Jennifer Connelly's topless scene, but this sultry southern noir deserves more than prurient interest. It's arguably Dennis Hopper's best directorial effort (OK, so that's not saying much), and Charles Williams' source novel
Hell Hath No Fury finds Hopper in a comfortable B-movie milieu, riffing on
Double Indemnity with an overripe tale of sex, greed and blackmail in an unnamed Texan town. Fresh from the final season of
Miami Vice, Don Johnson stars as a shifty drifter, conning his way into a salesman job on a used-car lot, where the boss's insatiable wife (Virginia Madsen) offers him sexual favours and a lovely secretary's (Connelly) innocence is threatened by a percolating scandal. Nobody's
really innocent, of course, and Hopper spices this languid web of secrets with enough trashy misbehaviour to qualify
The Hot Spot as a bona fide guilty pleasure. --
Jeff Shannon
