‘Red Shoe Diaries: The Movie’ DVD Review

Back in the 1980’s, the cable entertainment network Showtime was one of the first movie networks (Showtime, HBO, Cinemax, The Movie Channel) to produce their own series’. Shows like It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, Super Dave, and Brothers were successful comedy hits. But the company was looking for an hour-long dramatic series, something of an adult nature. Around that time, filmmaker Zalman King had released several films of an erotic genre-9 ½ Weeks, Wild Orchid, and Two Moon Junction-and Showtime felt that he was the one to bring that genre to television. So, in 1992, King delivered the pilot to what is known as Showtime’s most successful series-Red Shoe Diaries.

The series starred David Duchovny (The X-Files) as the host of each episode. He plays Jake, an architect with a dog named Stella. At the opening of each episode, he would receive a letter and/or diary in the mail, sent to him because of an ad he placed in the paper, asking for people to send him their stories of love and lost love. With these stories, he hopes to gain understand why the love of his life would cheat on him, and in a depressive state, kill herself (No spoilers here, they bury her in the first 5 minutes). The film is mostly a series of flashbacks of him reading her diary, telling him of his fiancés escapades.

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The courtship between Jake and Alex (Brigitte Bako) is brisk and passionate. He is a good man who is willing to give Alex anything she desires. But she has lived a privileged life, usually getting whatever she wants. But Alex has a tendency to flirt with disaster, and in this case, she desires something more than the stable relationship Jake offers.

After an eye appointment, Alex literally stumbles into a construction worker (Billy Wirth) and he stimulates her senses. She follows him one day after working at the construction site and finds he has another job as a shoe salesman. He tantalizes her with a pair of red high heels and his hand sliding up her leg. He gives her his address. When she arrives, you find that he is somewhat of a control freak, but she is aroused by this danger that Jake cannot provide.

Knowing nothing of what’s going on behind his back, Jake proposes to Alex, which she accepts. When she attempts to tell the worker that their relationship must end, he refuses, telling Alex that he can’t let her go. This puts Alex in a depressive tailspin, torn between the two men in her life. Crossing that line where there is no return, Alex feels the only way out of her situation is suicide, slitting her wrists in a bathtub. This leaves Jake alone, reading the diary of Alex, which forces him to confront the man who destroyed his life.

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Red Shoe Diaries provides soap opera plots, titillating sex, and decent production values. Unfortunately, it also has ridiculously slow pacing, repetitive scenes and amateurish acting. Although I do like his performance in the X-Files series, David Duchovny is one of the least interesting actors working today. His performance here is pretty bland, lacking any screen presence. When he does have his bigger moments, such as when he plays basketball against the man who slept with his wife, he is laughably bad. Bako, as Jake’s fiancé, is badly in need of some direction here. She wanders from scene to scene without much point. And Wirth, as the construction worker/shoe salesman comes off as more creep than stud. All three leads lack any charisma to hold an audience’s attention. The only performance that makes an impact is Brenda Vaccaro as Alex’s drunken mother. She knows how to play material of this nature.

Directed by Zalman King, the film slogs through a running time of 105 minutes. Scenes play out so long, it becomes uninteresting. What King was going for was seduction, what he got was boredom. Even the film’s sex scenes come off as tired and boring. If only he had trimmed it down to the time an episode of the series was (55 minutes), it may have played out better. But scenes, such as Alex’s final walk home, played out way too long. And the basketball game at the end of the film had such a strange homoerotic feel to it, you wondered if it was put in the film by mistake, because it just didn’t fit.

Red Shoe Diaries has some nice production values, with large expansive rooms and billowing curtains, providing a nice atmosphere for scenes. Cinematographer Marc Reshovsky provides some impressive moments with the lighting and shadows, and George S. Clinton’s score, utilizing a solo saxophone, is very sultry. All this gives Red Shoe Diaries a film noir feel. Unfortunately, the filmmakers appeared more focused on the style of the film, when they should have been more worried about it’s substance.

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Extras:

The two primary extras on this disc are nearly identical. Zalman King Introduces Red Shoe Diaries has some on-camera interviews with the director as he talks about some of the actors involved with the series. Behind his talking you see the scenes of the numerous performers. The Stars of Red Shoe Diaries shows that same film of the performers, without King’s voiceover. The Photo Gallery shows about ten shots from the film, mostly pulled off the video. All in all not a whole lot to look at.

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