In erotic, straight-to-video b-movies, the protagonist is often a housewife, and they are always ignored by their business minded husbands.
In "Playback" the neglected housewife is played by music video girl Tawny Kitaen, she of the heavy auburn hair. The plot is complicated, though, by the presence of softcore goddess Shannon Whirry, who is just as career oriented as the husband she works with, but of course, also manages to have time to seduce him.
The movie also stars George Hamilton, aka "the tanned one", and Harry Dean Stanton. Before Whirry meets Stanton, she is approached by a young cowboy in a bar, and tells him to "suck my dick". You don't often hear women say that in movies.
The neglectful husband goes to a strip club with his other empty suit buddies. Strip clubs in movies like this may as well be sideshows of plastic surgery gone awry. There's always at least one woman whose breasts look like they're made out of plaster. Surgeons should go to these places and take notes.
I appreciate the fact that the neglectful husband in these movies is usually a good man, only neglectful because he is trying to improve his and his wife's lives. When he realises his wife is unsatisfied, he starts trying to change to please her. The wife will often also have a sex crazed best friend who will advise her, as she does here.
In this one, Shannon Whirry is the bad girl trying to seduce Kitaen's husband and screw him over at work. Harry Dean Stanton is the sleazy private dick who investigates the husband, and discovers his efforts to spice up his marriage, ie. watching the kinds of movies he's currently appearing in.
Watching Tawny and the husband have sex in a video that Stanton was somehow able to film, Whirry is presumably just trying to dig up dirt on the husband to bump him off the corporate ladder... but becomes turned on and sort of starts to masturbate (they don't go very far with this, for some reason). Whirry then not only wants to take the husband out of commission... she wants to seduce him! And when he demurs, can you guess what happens next?
"Playback" then, is like three typical softcore/thriller plots in one movie. It's the neglected housewife trying to spice up her marriage. It's the tale of corporate espionage as sexual politics conflict with office politics in the gender integrated modern workplace. AND it's a thriller about a dangerous woman who tries to seduce a man, gets "Scorned" (heh heh), and plots her revenge.
But the twists don't stop there. "Playback" is, like most straight-to-video softcore thriller b-movies from the '90s, just good, trashy fun. Characters don't behave or respond in any kind of believable way, but so what? That makes it more entertaining as you try to guess what ridiculous thing will happen next. It feels like there was a screenwriting conference where the producers used a pinwheel to dictate how their characters (particularly the husband) would react to his trials and tribulations, and just went from there.
There's also not that much sex or nudity in it, probably because there's so much plot, and the world hadn't yet happened upon the "Game of Thrones" method of exposition dumps mid-coitus. I also would have swapped Tawny Kitaen and Shannon Whirry's roles. In one scene, Tawny is looking at a glamour mag saying "how am I supposed to compete with that?" Um, did you ever look in the mirror, love? No, not just to check out how good your surgeon is.
I think Kitaen would have made a better femme fatale than Whirry, who would have made a better neglected, sexy young housewife-next-door.
