Poison Ivy is set in Los Angeles where Sylvie Cooper (Sara Gilbert) has been summoned to the principal's office at school for phoning in a bomb threat to her father's television station, there she meets & talks to the mysterious & alluring Ivy (Drew Barrymore). Almost complete opposites the mild mannered & unadventurous Sylvie & the overt & sexually active Ivy strike up a firm relationship & quickly become best friends, Ivy practically moves into Sylvie's giant mansion where her suicidal mother Georgie (Cheryl Ladd) is very ill with emphysema. Ivy starts to take control of the Cooper's lives, Ivy starts to seduce Sylvie's rich father Daryl (Tom Skerritt) & begins to rip the Cooper family apart...
Co-written & directed by Katt Shea I have to say that I thought Poison Ivy was a really limp thriller that offered no surprises or genuine tension, why exactly has it spawned three sequels & counting? I suppose the biggest problem with Poison Ivy is the lethargic & uninvolving script that has wafer thin character's you don't care about sleepwalk through the film. There's no passion here, no excitement, nothing to get the pulse racing, there are no big twists or turns & the entire thing is very predictable. It's never clear why Ivy targets the Cooper's, why she befriends Sylvie (before she finds out her dad's mega rich), nothing about Ivy's background is ever mentioned other than she lived with an Aunt & quite why Ivy wanted to ruin a good thing by wrecking the career of Daryl, killing Georgie & betraying Sylie is a complete mystery to me, I mean she had been all but adopted by the Cooper's as part of the family so why ruin it with no obvious benefit other than breaking a family up & making everyone hate her. With no background on Ivy & no apparent source of motivation it's hard to care to be quite honest. The sacking of Daryl from his job gets one short scene that feels like an afterthought & didn't seem to affect the story that much at all. Then there's the slow pace, things only start to pick up towards the end & it's not until past the hour mark when things turn really nasty & by then the films almost over. There's some poor attempts at psychology as Sylvie has to deal with her ill mother complete with ghostly hallucinations, there's the issue of peer pressure, betrayal, the idea that family is the most important thing in life & teenage rebellion but it's all just padding with little thought or effort going into it. I mean if the most extreme thing Ivy does to Sylvie for the first hour is pamper her dog too much then you know your in trouble.
I must admit that I found Poison Ivy really tiresome to watch on a visual level as well, the opening scene of Ivy swinging through the air where she flicks her hair away from her face looks like it belongs in a cheap shampoo commercial. None of it is erotic or sexy & simply dressing Drew Barrymore up in a few tight outfits doesn't cut it, the sex scenes are tame & I am pretty sure Barrymore got a body double. There's one breast shot & one naked male butt & that's your lot. Personally I didn't find Barrymore attractive in this at all, her shallow pointless character & wooden acting combined to send me to sleep rather than send shivers down my spine. There's no violence to speak of & even the 'Unrated' version doing the rounds on DVD is very tame by todays standards as teen flicks such as American Pie (1999) & The Hangover (2009) are far more explicit.
With a supposed budget of about $3,000,000 this flopped at the box-office & you can see why, there's nothing here other than for Drew Barrymore fans & considering this was one of her first films she probably didn't have many at the time. The acting is pretty poor, I thought Barrymore was very wooden with no menace or sexuality about her performance at all while Tom Skerritt looks bored.
Poison Ivy is a terrible erotic thriller that is neither erotic or thrilling in any way as far as I am concerned, a real damp squib of a limp wristed film that delivers nothing. Followed by Poison Ivy II (1996), Poison Ivy: The New Seduction (1997) & Poison Ivy: The Secret Society (2008).
Co-written & directed by Katt Shea I have to say that I thought Poison Ivy was a really limp thriller that offered no surprises or genuine tension, why exactly has it spawned three sequels & counting? I suppose the biggest problem with Poison Ivy is the lethargic & uninvolving script that has wafer thin character's you don't care about sleepwalk through the film. There's no passion here, no excitement, nothing to get the pulse racing, there are no big twists or turns & the entire thing is very predictable. It's never clear why Ivy targets the Cooper's, why she befriends Sylvie (before she finds out her dad's mega rich), nothing about Ivy's background is ever mentioned other than she lived with an Aunt & quite why Ivy wanted to ruin a good thing by wrecking the career of Daryl, killing Georgie & betraying Sylie is a complete mystery to me, I mean she had been all but adopted by the Cooper's as part of the family so why ruin it with no obvious benefit other than breaking a family up & making everyone hate her. With no background on Ivy & no apparent source of motivation it's hard to care to be quite honest. The sacking of Daryl from his job gets one short scene that feels like an afterthought & didn't seem to affect the story that much at all. Then there's the slow pace, things only start to pick up towards the end & it's not until past the hour mark when things turn really nasty & by then the films almost over. There's some poor attempts at psychology as Sylvie has to deal with her ill mother complete with ghostly hallucinations, there's the issue of peer pressure, betrayal, the idea that family is the most important thing in life & teenage rebellion but it's all just padding with little thought or effort going into it. I mean if the most extreme thing Ivy does to Sylvie for the first hour is pamper her dog too much then you know your in trouble.
I must admit that I found Poison Ivy really tiresome to watch on a visual level as well, the opening scene of Ivy swinging through the air where she flicks her hair away from her face looks like it belongs in a cheap shampoo commercial. None of it is erotic or sexy & simply dressing Drew Barrymore up in a few tight outfits doesn't cut it, the sex scenes are tame & I am pretty sure Barrymore got a body double. There's one breast shot & one naked male butt & that's your lot. Personally I didn't find Barrymore attractive in this at all, her shallow pointless character & wooden acting combined to send me to sleep rather than send shivers down my spine. There's no violence to speak of & even the 'Unrated' version doing the rounds on DVD is very tame by todays standards as teen flicks such as American Pie (1999) & The Hangover (2009) are far more explicit.
With a supposed budget of about $3,000,000 this flopped at the box-office & you can see why, there's nothing here other than for Drew Barrymore fans & considering this was one of her first films she probably didn't have many at the time. The acting is pretty poor, I thought Barrymore was very wooden with no menace or sexuality about her performance at all while Tom Skerritt looks bored.
Poison Ivy is a terrible erotic thriller that is neither erotic or thrilling in any way as far as I am concerned, a real damp squib of a limp wristed film that delivers nothing. Followed by Poison Ivy II (1996), Poison Ivy: The New Seduction (1997) & Poison Ivy: The Secret Society (2008).