The early ’90s were a cinematic golden age of gorgeous obsessives scheming seaside in trash, glorious trash, and while Obsessed (1992), Shannen Doherty’s entry in that sweepstakes, was made for ABC, it has the lurid spirit of a Cinemax special. Your hopes will soar from its opening scenes, when her Lorie Brindel, a marine surveyor in her early-to-mid twenties, is dispatched to appraise a yacht for insurance purposes and arrives in her finest miniskirt, appallingly baby-voiced and flirtatious with a silver-haired client, Ed Bledsoe (William Devane).
“I’ve seen a lot of boats but not many this old, in this kind of shape, Mr. Bledsoe,” she coos, impressed by the majesty of his vessel. You’re forgiven for anticipating the strains of “bom-chicka-wawa” on the soundtrack, and that’s before she admiringly runs her hand along his yacht’s woodwork as he grins like a Cheshire cat. They show some propriety by arranging a dinner date, and their first tryst — a very ’90s ordeal with excessive closeups of limbs entangled in white sheets (and Lorie reverently kissing Ed’s saggy chest) — is scored with the same saxophone music that accompanied all sex in TV movies during the Clinton administration.
“It was beyond sex, it was spiritual,” she sighs to her roommate (Lisa Ann Poggi) the next day. “I’ve never felt like this before. Ed is going to love me forever and ever, amen.” In the glow of a roaring fire following their next ridiculous romp, she asks if he’ll love her eternally. When he doesn’t answer seriously, her mood changes on a dime. It becomes a familiar pattern, Lorie’s neediness turning to nastiness, followed by vigorous power-reestablishing sex, this time in a steamy shower — and then she moves in without permission when Ed’s on a business trip, a step he’s not ready to take.
The occasional flatness of Doherty’s delivery doesn’t seem to be an artistic choice, but it almost works for her empty shell of a character. Lorie is a bunny boiler, the sort of textbook personality-disordered villainess we recall most fondly from Play Misty for Me and Fatal Attraction, but screenwriter David E. Peckinpah (Hotline) invests little in her backstory. She has a wealthy, inattentive father barely older than Ed, but absentee dads are a dime a dozen; young seductresses as adept at arson and financial sabotage as phone harassment are rarer. Doherty skates by with an incurious performance because she’s as striking in some scenes as Isabelle Adjani.
In the battle of Beverly Hills, 90210 spurned lovers, she still comes out ahead of An Unfinished Affair’s Jennie Garth (and even Pia Zadora can act circles around Tori Spelling), but it’s hard to fathom why Lorie considers Ed such a prize. Twice-divorced and reeking through the television of stale cigars and dirty laundry, he’s a golf fanatic who plainly tells her he’s not interested in commitment. Then again, Devane is the Jack Nicholson of the small screen, excelling at the sort of charming disreputability that later made him a natural fit for the scammy gold and Medicare helpline commercials in which he currently stars.
Though director Jonathan Sanger (Children of the Bride) doesn’t dwell on diagnoses even after Lorie finds herself in a clinical setting, Obsessed can be viewed as the first entry in Devane’s informal DSM trilogy, followed by the anorexia-themed For the Love of Nancy and Forgotten Sins, about repressed memories and satanic panic. All three feature deeply mentally ill young women in Devane’s orbit, but only Obsessed is salacious enough to have one of them play with matches and yell things like “Were you just using me like some whore? Is that all I am to you?”, which unsurprisingly makes it the most fun.
Streaming and DVD availability
Obsessed currently streams on YouTube.
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Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
Michael
This actually sounds like a blast. Maybe I’m just saying that because I have a soft spot for early ‘90s TV thrillers and an even softer spot for Doherty. She’s one of those actors whose seeming disregard for the material is actually incredibly appealing to me. Like, I can tell she’s just cashing a check, but I don’t care.
Cranky
I was pleasantly surprised by this one. You’re right that Doherty’s disregard is part of the allure; it heightens the pathos and makes her characters even less predictable than they already are on the surface.