ooof

Hollywood and bondage hardly ever go together. I could count on one hand the number of times it’s actually worked. Comedy and bondage probably even less so, discounting all the unintentional laughs of “50 Shades of Grey”. “Exit to Eden” is a bondage comedy, made by people who should have known better. It’s bad, it’s really bad. Then again, there is a scene where we could have seen Rosie O’Donnell get her toes sucked, so it could have been worse.


O’Donnell and Dan Aykroyd play a couple of L.A. cops on the trail of some diamond smuggling operation, or something like that. They, along with the smugglers (Iman, Stuart Wilson), end up at a hedonistic bondage island where both are trying to get to a photographer named Elliot (Paul Mercurio) who has snapped an incriminating photograph of the smugglers. Dana Delaney is also on hand as the island’s lead dominatrix, who takes an interest in Elliot.


This was directed by Gary Marshall, the same guy who did “Pretty Woman” and “Overboard”. You would think his goal here was to make another romantic comedy. But the material is oddly based off a book by Anne Rice, the same lady who does the erotic vampire and werewolf novels. The combination is incredibly weird.


First, because the film has no laughs. It’s easy to see that O’Donnell and Aykroyd were shoehorned in here to make something happen. But the whole cop plot is needless yet both comic actors remain so aloof in the actual bondage stuff that they don’t work in that either. Aykroyd, playing repressed, is absent most of the film, and O’Donnell’s jokes are lame as can be, and delivered in comedy club fashion where instead of leaning into the subject of the film, she remains ornery and abrasive with everyone. She also provides narration for the film, where the jokes are equally bad and she seems more than ready to move on from this movie as quickly as she can.
And what is this sex island? Much of the time we all we see are lectures about being a better partner and some silly Greco-Roman cos-playing. It’s strange that the most intimate thing on the island is the doctor who does the hernia checks.


Was Marshall afraid that romance and actual kinky sex couldn’t get sold to a general audience? It seems like it. Take the Mercurio-Delaney relationship. Which starts out at about a 5 before succumbing to handholding, long walks, and cuddling and giggling. And the conflict of the relationship- that she fears losing control- is eye-rolling


It’s also impossible to buy the Delany character- from the awful flashbacks which are supposed to convince us that dominatrix is what she was destined to do (but don’t) to Delany’s cute, girl next door demeanor which never changes or shows a more sadistic streak underneath. Nearly everything here, from the acting to the two plots to the cheapness of the production serve to only point out that none of this was meant as anything more than a goofy joke. But there’s a difference between leaning into the material, and just being a clown about it. “Eden” does the latter.