Wild Cactus (1993): Desert Heat

Matty profiles erotic thriller auteur Jag Mundhra’s provocative masterpiece.

Suffering the ignominy of being sandwiched by L.A. Goddess (1993) and Tropical Heat (1993) – the two worst films he’d ever slap his name to – WILD CACTUS (1993) is the late, great Jag Mundhra’s first five star masterpiece, and joins the astounding Irresistible Impulse (1996) as the erotic thriller maestro’s crowning genre achievement. A quirky, darkly comic offering, Wild Cactus sports a delicious ‘David Lynch meets Quentin Tarantino’ vibe, serving as a midpoint between the unsettling, dream-like delivery of Wild at Heart (1990) and the snappy rambunctiousness of True Romance (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994) (NB – while neither True Romance nor Natural Born Killers were released at the time of Wild Cactus’ making, their scripts were the talk of Hollywood).

But to be clear:

Mundhra’s caper ain’t no cash-in or copy.

It’s an edgy, sexy, and evocative work that, artistically and dramatically, lives up to the connotations of its Wild Orchid (1989)-aping title.

Opulence. Spiky beauty. Unfettered energy.

At the core of the film is a sensational script. The start of a nine picture union that’d extend to Sexual Malice (1994), Improper Conduct (1994) and a whole heap more, Wild Cactus was conceived by Mundhra and shaped by Carl Austin. As Mundhra told critic and academic Linda Ruth Williams:

“[Carl] is the first cousin of John Singleton, who did Boyz N the Hood (1991). He’s a black street kid, lived in South Central, very shy. Wild Cactus was the first time I met him… He sat in my office, and I didn’t think he was getting what I was saying at all. I was trying to tell him the story of Straw Dogs (1971) and how I was inspired by that to do Wild Cactus. He wasn’t taking any notes, and I was thinking, “Are you not following me because of my accent or what?”. So he said, “OK, I’ll see you in a week”. And after a week, he gave me Wild Cactus’ script and I couldn’t put it down! Carl absorbed everything I said, added elements of his own, gave it nice twists and turns, with the genre. And I thought, “Wow, this is good”. His dialogue is very street-smart; very crisp and distinct.” [1]

Then in the midst of a bankable DTV run due to his appearances in The Sleeping Car (1990) and Steel and Lace (1991), David Naughton stars as boring, jobsworth college professor Phillip Marcus. Because stuffy ol’ Pip is clearly a lunatic, he repeatedly rebuffs the advances of his gorgeous younger wife, Alex (Playboy centrefold India Allen). Desperate to get her leg over, Alex seeks advice from a friend in a similar predicament (Mundhra regular Wendy MacDonald) who encourages her to have an affair (a classic Mundhra device – cf. Night Eyes (1990), The Other Woman (1992) – and, indeed, an oft-used erotic thriller trope). However, a better means of matrimonial reconnection comes in the form of a his n’ hers stay at an isolated bolt hole in a quiet Arizona desert town – where, alas, psychotic criminal Randall Murphy (Gary Hudson) and his newly acquired, equally nutty squeeze, Maggie (Michelle Moffett), are also heading…

Never entirely serious, Wild Cactus’ naughty and raucous tone is grounded by symmetrical plot strands. Both The Murphys and Randall and Maggie converge upon the sleepy backwater at the same time, looking for something. The former yearn for reconciliation and sexual fulfilment, the latter violence and revenge. Their eventual collision unfolds as if it were an inevitability. Mundhra’s subsequent erotics – Sexual Malice etc. – eschew surrealism and mostly remain rooted in reality (albeit a ‘reality’ within the parameters of their genre). Wild Cactus, though, finds the helmer in the same dreamy terrain as Night Eyes and Last Call (1991). Mundhra presents the way Randall and Maggie happen across each other as the obvious symptom of an unavoidable cosmic force; and when, in turn, the gruesome twosome are happened across by The Murphys, there’s a strong sense that the crazed, horndog duo are, in fact, Phillip and Alex’s marriage problems made flesh. A roadblock that The Murphys have to overcome to function as a unit again.

Oozing a suitably sweltering atmosphere, Austin and Mundhra unleash a cornucopia of brilliant scenes and moments that Mundhra directs the hell out of: Randall saving Philip in a bar fight; an the unbearably tense sequence where Randall and Maggie accost an old associate (Kathy Shower, another Mundhra regular) in her trailer; Alex trying to escape Randall and Maggie’s clutches in her underwear when they take her hostage; the mesmeric sight of Naughton handling a snake, and then tear-arsing across the desert on a moped; and an incredibly well-staged — and highly visual — bit of boot-knocking, whereupon Randall ravages Maggie on top of a car bonnet parked by some rail tracks as a train shuttles past.

Featuring supporting slots from Robert Z’Dar and Brian Yuzna favourite David Wells (Society (1989), Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990), The Guyver (1991)), performances are uniformly solid but it’s Hudson and Moffett who steal the show. Charismatic, dangerous, intensely sexual — they’re like a pair of hyenas pumped full of aphrodisiacs, and their chemistry is off the charts. The two would reunite — to lesser effect — in the Shannon Tweed crotch opera Indecent Behavior (1993).

Co-produced by Alan B. Bursteen, Wild Cactus landed on U.S. tape via longtime Mundhra peddler Imperial Entertainment on 24th March 1993 — two months ahead of L.A. Goddess, five months ahead of Tropical Heat — and on British cassette through 20:20 Vision on 27th October 1993 — five months after the U.K. bow of L.A. Goddess, six months after the U.K. bow of The Other Woman.