| Animal Instincts | |
| Director: | Gregory Dark |
| Producer: | Andrew W. Garroni |
| Screenplay: | Jon Robert Samsel Georges des Esseintes |
| Starring: | Maxwell Caulfield Jan-Michael Vincent Shannon Whirry Delia Sheppard |
| Music: | Joseph Smith |
| Cinematography: | Wally Pfister |
| Editing: | James Avalon |
| Studio: | Wilshire Film Ventures |
| Distributor: | Axis Films International |
| Runtime: | 95 minutes |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
Animal Instincts is a 1992 American erotic thriller drama film directed by Gregory Dark and starring Maxwell Caulfield, Shannon Whirry, Jan-Michael Vincent and David Carradine.[1] [2] [3] This film spawned two sequels: Animal Instincts 2 (1994) (also with Whirry) and Animal Instincts 3 (also known as Animal Instincts: The Seductress).
Joanna (Whirry) is married to David Cole (Caulfield), a police officer. While they love each other, their marriage is in a precarious position, as David's sexual impotence prevents them from being intimate with each other. A sexually-frustrated Joanna ends up having an extramarital affair with a cable repairman; when they are caught in the act by David, David's response is to passionately have sex with Joanna, to Joanna's surprise. Joanna concludes that he "likes to watch", so they resort to get involved in voyeurism: Joanna gets involved in multiple affairs to several other men in her and David's home, which David videotapes with a hidden camera to later watch. Problems arise, however, when the local mob learns about their sexual activities, and their leader (Carradine) blackmails them to videotape an encounter with a crooked politician (Vincent).[4]
Animal Instincts was rated R in the United States for explicit sexual material and profanity.[5] Similar ratings were bestowed on the film in Australia under the Office of Film and Literature Classification Rating Board (for "high level sexual material")[6] and the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) Rating System Network.[7]
Animal Instincts was given mixed to substandard reviews by audience and film critics. Under Rotten Tomatoes, the audience gave the film only a 14% rating.[8] Radio Times magazine gave two out of five stars to the film, describing it as "the thriller that made Shannon Whirry a favourite of the top-shelf brigade", and writing "Director Gregory Hippolyte, who became one of the genre's leading directors, presents the many couplings with some panache, but he can't hide the fact that this is really just Emmanuelle for the 1990s."[9]