Matty tracks the meta-referential madness of Gary Graver’s erotic drama-cum-thriller.

Here in the U.K. SEXUAL ROULETTE (1997) hit VHS and, eventually, DVD as ‘Weekend in Vegas’. In addition to the title switch, of note is the tape and disc’s cover art. As well as name-dropping the film’s biggest influence — tagline: “an indecent proposal too tempting to resist” — the sleeves are a reminder of just how much clout the DTV erotic thriller once had, playing up Sexual Roulette’s connection to A Woman Scorned (1993), an earlier flick from (uncredited) producers Ashok Amritraj and Andrew Stevens. 

Having met while circling Roger Corman’s orbit at the end of the ‘80s, Amritraj and Stevens found common ground career-wise. Wanting to transition from their day jobs (professional tennis and acting, respectively) to production, they swiftly joined forces.

Their first collaboration, Eyewitness to Murder (1989), flirted with erotic thriller tropes as established by the big budget pioneers (Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981) et al). 

Their sophomore venture, Night Eyes (1990), galvanised the form’s value for hungry B-movie moguls.

Sitting alongside the Corman-backed Body Chemistry (1990) as video-strain erotica’s ground zero, Night Eyes was a mega-smash on cassette and cable, and set a framework that Amritraj and Stevens would return to — separately and together — numerous times across the next decade. However, despite the financial success of Scorned, Illicit Dreams (1994), and the Night Eyes sequels, the pair’s lust for legitimacy led to a reluctance to be publicly associated with the kind of saucy fluff they’d popularised. Thus, once Amritraj and Stevens’ company, Royal Oaks Entertainment, moved into the more socially acceptable family and action movie markets with Invisible Mom (1996) and Crash Dive (1996), they outsourced the softcore to talent like Alan B. Bursteen, Fred Olen Ray and Gary Graver, and masked their involvement with side shingles such as — wait for it — Palm Entertainment (winky face). That said, the duo would frequently reveal themselves (second winky face) via copyright notices and via how their cheap n’ cheerful shag-a-thons referenced and stole from each other. The incestuous use of casts and crews, and the recycling and repurposing of the same footage created a strange multiverse of sorts among the films in question: Virtual Desire (1995), Over the Wire (1996), Night Shade (1996), Fugitive Rage (1996), the Masseuse and Escort trilogies, and, of course, Sexual Roulette.

Effectively a giant in-joke doubling as shelf and late night schedule filler, the Graver-directed Sexual Roulette opens with the words “A Don Key Production” – a ‘donkey scene’ being what Stevens and co. colloquially called a sex scene. Several of the Vegas stock shots employed in the credits previously appeared in Jim Wynorski’s Vampirella (1996) – another Stevens caper – and the ubiquitous ‘Noble Henry’ is listed as the film’s costume designer. Assigned to the aforementioned Wynorski on IMDb, ‘Henry’ is, in fact, a pseudonym used to cloak multiple Royal Oaks – and, later, successor studio(s) Franchise/Phoenician – personnel and affiliates [1]. On the subject of aliases, the mighty Peter Spellos – star of Sorority House Massacre II (1990) and Hard to Die (1990) – submits an excellent turn as a tyrannical gangster, and is billed under his non-union friendly alter-ego, ‘G. Gordon Baer’. A vivid and pleasingly cartoon-y portrayal, Spellos features in one of Sexual Roulette’s best moments: the vaguely Scorsese-esque ‘whacking’ of Richard Gabai’s barman character who, in a further bit of meta-referential business, is named after Graver, Ray and Stevens compatriot Chick Vennera, and is bumped off in a room home to a similar sequence in Ray’s Graver-lensed Royal Oaks shoot-’em-up, Maximum Security (1996).

Along with the japery, Sexual Roulette boasts a functional script (by Royal Oaks regular Sean McGinly – Strategic Command (1997), A Woman Scorned 2 (1997)) that’s elevated by a few novel directorial licks and the weird, semi-autobiographical edge Graver seems to foster. Centring on the idea of desperation and desire going hand in hand — a notion key to much of Graver’s pornographic work — the film’s plot is rooted in the Hollywood fringe. Inhabiting Sexual Roulette’s Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore avatars, Tim Abell and Gabriella Hall play a couple whose careers and annoyances echo that of Graver and his longtime partner, Jillian Kersner. Abell is a struggling filmmaker, Hall a frustrated actress, and both of them are sick of plying their trades in the schlocky exploitation arena. Now, whether Graver and Kersner ever frittered their life savings away during a mad ‘un in sin city is another matter; and whether Graver had to repeatedly bed a wealthy socialite (Tane McLure, giving a tremendous performance as the film’s gender-flipped Robert Redford analogue) in order to settle a gambling debt is strictly conjecture…

Also known as ‘Carnal Risk’, Sexual Roulette – which Graver partly shot in Vegas’ Riviera Hotel & Casino – was issued on U.S. video by A-Pix on 15th April 1997, arriving on the same day as Anthony Hickox’s Invasion of Privacy (1996), the Damian Chapa-starring Playboy joint Midnight Blue (1997), and Nu Image’s sci-fi faux-quel, Shadowchaser: The Gates of Time (1996). It was made available in R-rated (88mins) and unrated (94mins) versions – though, curiously, the rumpy-pumpy is pretty tepid in either cut.

[1] The nom-de-plume’s claim to fame is being listed as the helmer of Virtual Desire, a hodgepodge that Wynorski started and Fred Olen Ray finished. Henry — styled as ‘Henri’ there, to cement the “French auteur” backstory — even gave an exclusive interview in the pages of Femme Fatales at the time. According to a wishing-to-remain-anonymous source, when Franchise collapsed and their shady dealings were being investigated by the FBI’s fraud squad, Stevens was questioned about his use of the moniker while taking the stand in court. “Why the pseudonym?” the prosecution asked. “Because it amuses me,” came Stevens’ cocksure response.