A sadomasochism tale in which the most pain is inflicted on the audience. This is one truly awful movie. A woman meets a mysterious man who pushes her sexual boundaries. This mystery man is the dominant type and he leads the relationship into some dark places. He's manipulative, at times abusive. She goes along for the ride. Happily at first, less happily later. She gets emotional, he does some more stupid and bizarre things, and then the movie just fizzles out. Tension and drama are in very short supply. What little dialogue there is in the movie is mostly laughable. Basically the movie just careens aimlessly from one "daring" sex scene to the next. And while the film has achieved a somewhat notorious reputation it's really not that daring at all. Any of the really dark stuff is only hinted at, not seen. What's on the screen is not explicit at all, by today's standards it's downright tame. Watching people play with their food is not particularly erotic. Mickey Rourke turns in an atrocious performance, smirking his way through the whole thing. Kim Basinger comes off slightly better but she's not nearly good enough to save this dreck. How they ever stretched this movie to a length of nearly two hours is beyond me. There's not even enough story here to sustain a 30-minute TV show, much less a full-length feature film. On and on it goes with nothing interesting ever happening. This is about as bad as it gets.