Primal Instinct 2004 Horror Movie Review

A BDSM “sub-culture” of Los Angeles serves as backdrop for this low budget and shabbily constructed mess, plainly a vanity piece for its top-billed player, Celia Xavier, who also produces and scripts while performing a dual role as twin sisters Vanessa and Celia.  A question soon develops as to whether or not some rather immoderate camera, lighting and editing pyrotechnics can ever reach a point of connection to a weak and often incoherent narrative that will not be taken seriously by a sensate viewer.  Celia is employed as a highly motivated probation officer for the County of Los Angeles, while her evil natured twin has become an iconic figure within her fetishistic world largely because of erotic performances upon CD-ROMS, but when disaster befalls “Mistress Vanessa”, virtuous Celia, determined to unearth her sister’s vicious attacker, begins a new job as a “sex slave” at the private Castle Club where the specialty of the house is a “dungeon party”.  Two FBI field agents (whose deployment to the Vanessa case is ostensibly required due to her involvement with internet BDSM sites), in addition to a Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective, are assigned to investigate the crime, while endeavouring to provide security for Celia whose enthusiastic performance in her new vocation is avidly enough regarded by her customers as to have created conditions of personal danger for her.  Flaws in logic and continuity abound, such as a homicide being allocated to L.A.P.D.‘s Operations-South Bureau, a region of the metropolis that is far removed from the setting of the film.  Direction is unfocussed and not aided by erratic post-production editing and sound reproduction.  The mentioned photographic gymnastics culminate with a batty montage near the movie’s end of prior footage that is but tangentially referent to the scenario.  One solid acting turn appears among this slag: Stan Abe as a zealous FBI agent.