Well, we’ve come a long way from the cult Sundance hit Poison Ivy starring Drew Barrymore. What, you didn’t know that Poison Ivy actually premiered at Sundance in 1992 and was nominated for the dramatic Grand Jury Prize along side movies like Reservoir Dogs? Well, you learn something new every day, don’t you?
The first Poison Ivy movie spurred a cult following, and with most movies that garner “cult” status, film studios think that is their license to churn out hack sequel after hack sequel until the audience is bled dry both of money and any feeling of good will they had toward the original film.
So on down the sequel road we’ve gone, from Drew Barrymore, to Alyssa Milano in Poison Ivy II: Lily, Jamie Pressly in Poison Ivy: The New Seduction, and finally to today’s featured presentation Poison Ivy 4: The Secret Society starring Miriam McDonald (Degrassi: The Next Generation) and various other girls who like to take their shirts off.
The Show
The cover of Poison Ivy 4 features a sultry brunette sexily buttoning up her shirt and the same vixen soaking wet in a pool with her clothes on. Flames lap at the title giving the would-be watcher an ominous feeling of thrills and sex. At least this is what I thought while inspecting the case. So you can imagine my surprise when what I got was a comedy.
Poison Ivy 4 had me laughing my head off five minutes into the film as poor country girl Daisy is planning on leaving her hick boyfriend and his newly purchased piece of land for a chance at an education from a big prestigious school. To say the dialogue is clunky is to insult clunks everywhere. It’s best described as the vocal equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard — one step away from reading off of cue cards.
But it’s not fair of us to hold Poison Ivy 4 to such a high standard, right? We knew what we were getting into when we picked this title up. We wanted some nakedness and some sex. That’s it! Expecting a coherent, engaging story from the fourth installment in this series is like expecting Oscar-winning acting in a late-night Cinemax movie.
So let’s talk about those sex scenes since that’s the only reason anybody would be remotely interested in this film. Again, referring to late-night Cinemax shows, that’s the kind of sex you can expect, complete with campy saxophone “porn groove” music playing in the background. There’s no hint of eroticism involved here, just plain old rip-off-those-clothes-and-do-it-already sex.
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