Sex and Consequences: Scarier Than a Horror Film

Imagine the most heinous, annoying, mind-grating person you can think of.  Now imagine watching almost an hour and a half of that person, but somehow enjoying it.  That was how I felt when I watched Sex and Consequences.

Sex and Consequences is a drama about a middle-aged housewife (Joan Severance) who has an affair with an eighteen-year-old boy (Rodney Scott), while her devoted policeman husband (Corbin Bensen) has sex with her every week, is committed to her, and inquires about her feelings and tells her she’s beautiful.  Don’t hate her yet?  The movie is sprinkled with horrendous and gut-wrenching scenes worse than I have seen in the torture flick, Hostel, in which Severance’s character, Lisa, utters sentences to the teenager like, “I want you inside me”, “Maybe you’re my new toy”, and “I want you to touch me there, Sam.  I’m not wearing any panties…easy access.  Do it like I showed you.”  Disgusting.  But, like a car wreck, I couldn’t look away.  During her time with the peach-fuzz-faced child, even more repugnant scenes take place, one in which Sam says, “I want to lick you till you cum”, and another where Lisa says she is willing to do anything that “girls his age” wouldn’t be willing to do.  In another scene where Lisa describes one of her previous affairs, she says, “We never actually did it.  Circumstances didn’t allow for it.  There was just a lot of licking, sucking, stuff like that.”  Oh, please.

However, most of the reasons why Severance’s character is so annoying is because for the first half of the film, she has the inability to take anything seriously, and seems to be a constant porno cliche of a sexually frustrated older woman who is, for lack of better words, a complete slut.  Not  because she likes having sex, which is a normal human feeling, but a  because she likes having affairs with children and that sex is the only thing on her mind.  She also seems to have no discernible skills other than fellatio and girl-on-top.

Now, despite the fact that John Severance is around forty-five at the time of the movie, and in great shape for her age, you can’t get past the fact that she is having sex with someone young enough to be her son, maybe younger.  She deliberately puts him in danger by telling him her armed husband is “non confrontational” when he is clearly jealous enough to get violent.  You almost get used to this horrifying union, to the point that when you see Sam hanging out with a girl his own age, you think, “Eew…isn’t she too young for him?  That’s perverted!”

Now, there are some deeper aspects to the story which I wouldn’t want to spoil.  But these aspects definitely make you feel more invested in the film and characters.  So while you absolutely want to punch Lisa in the face, you do feel a little bit bad for her, and it appears that her dark secret fuels her destructive and moronic behavior.  However, by the time this secret comes out, you already despise her with such a passion that it’s impossible to feel true sympathy for her.

Perhaps I am personally invested in this film because of my personal disgust with the “cougar” trend, which somehow turns what would otherwise be known as perverseness for a man, into sexiness for a woman.  Any forty-five-year-old man preying on a teenage girl would be considered disgusting, not sexy.  Luckily, this movie doesn’t try to make it sexy.  In close-up sex scenes, Severance’s wrinkles are almost exaggerated by lighting, and sinister foreboding music plays in the background.  While watching the film, you’re not saying, “Ooh, that’s hot,” but instead you’re saying, “This women is not all there.”  And you’re right.  Despite her beauty, she has a crazed look in her chlorine-blue eyes that give you that creepy chills-down-the spine feeling.  

This movie had been criticized as “cheesy”.  It’s not.  Joan Severance’s character is a complex person who uses a mask of a cheesy and annoying cliche to hide her true, dark pain.  That’s what many people don’t realize.  It’s not a soft core porn flick, despite the constant shots of breasts.  It’s also not a cheap sexy thriller, like Swimfan or Fatal Attraction.  This movie is completely psychological.  It shows what would truly happen if an eighteen-year-old boy ended up having sex with a married older woman.  It wouldn’t be a constant porno where the woman let him do anal unlike the girls he knows from school, and jiggled her cellulite, stretchmarked-covered ass with abandon.  It would spiral out of control and turn into a messy, almost painful-to-watch chain of events.  This movie finally challenges the actually cheesy and ridiculous films which idolize the idea of the “sexually inhibited older woman” who seems to be a raving nymphomaniac devoid of any moral code. This movie is far deeper than those, and actually gives the cliched characters some depth and meaning.