The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Geek Pin-Up #18: Shannon Whirry

It seems a fair enough definition to call a geek someone who spent a good deal of their childhood alone in a darkened room. Also that some of their most important experiences are defined by what they have seen, rather than what they have done. With this in mind, I should like to nominate Shannon Whirry, star of a series of 'erotic thrillers' during the early to mid 90's, as our latest pin up, for services rendered to a teenaged me.

The films were called things like Animal Instincts and Mirror Images and usually involved Shannon as a repressed/bored housewife struggling against the confines of her marriage/sexual inexperience who is drawn into a shadowy world of sensual intrigue by circumstances beyond her control. Perhaps her husband is secretly filming their sex so, to save her marriage, she starts sleeping with other men just so her husband can watch the video. Perhaps her evil, sexy twin sister (that would be Mirror Images) tricks her into acting as a prostitute.

She would start off shocked by this steamy new world, but it would secretly thrill her, and she would then go back again and again to it, becoming more and more confident as she finally starts to express her true unbridled sexuality. All this leads up to a scene at the end of act two where she fully sheds her inhibitions, usually involving lezzing up and some spectacularly mild bondage. A saxophone will be playing in the next room.

Then there'll be a mobster, or some sort of obsessive man and this new sexy world starts getting dangerous for Shannon and it all gets resolved usually with a gunshot or two and Shannon going back to her old life, only much more sexually free and satisfied. Something like that anyway - these films were basically only watched for the nudity and Shannon's character arc of increasing naughtiness, both of which basically ended after the lezzing at the end of act two in favour of the 'thriller' part of the equation. Plus they were on late at night and that, coupled with other circumstances, usually led to me being asleep long before the end of these films.

Shannon herself was pretty great though. Looking a bit like a slightly more refined Sherilyn Fenn, if only for having a slightly taller face and a more fragile, translucent complexion, with the added bonus of massive, natural boobs, she could do innocent and repressed but still show that hint of a sexy fire having been lit within after that first encounter with the new world. She could also keep that tension going all the way through her libidinal adventures, never turning the sex into simple mechanical rutting. The films took these indiscretions and very mild perversions very seriously. Shannon seemed genuinely shocked that she was doing these things and, even worse, really enjoying them. This rather quaint prudery actually served to give the soft focus gyrations a bit of heft. It made them saucy, naughty - these erotic thrillers, in their own cheesy way, were actually erotic.

Now the films were, of course, atrocious. Slow paced, badly acted and nominally scripted to the point of being technically unwatchable these days, even for a fifteen year old. But the simple act of having a slightly old-fashioned attitude towards nookie, where wearing a blindfold was awfully, awfully kinky, gives them a certain charm lacking in the modern, ever more extreme gonzo fucking of modern porn.

Equally, the softcore DTV romps popping up in Blockbuster over the last half decade have been the Misty Mundae starring epics like Lord Of The G-Strings and Playmate Of The Apes. I've not seen any of these (there is a quiz held in the pub that inspired Shaun Of The Dead's The Winchester and once I was only 5 points away from winning an entire set of these films. My life is a tapestry of disappointment) but the jokey, knowing nature of these 'erotic pastiches' seems less alluring than the straight-faced melodrama of the Shannon Whirry starring, post-Basic Instinct 'erotic thrillers'.

In fact (just to make sure I don't write an entire article about softcore porn), my theory as to why Grindhouse bombed at the box office is that the great unwashed like their exploitation trash dead serious and without the too-cool-for-school post-ironic posturing of the Grindhouse trailers. Witness the success of 300, which consists of exactly the same sex and violence formula as all the B-movies Grindhouse was referencing but never acknowledges how cheesy it actually is.

It's most likely that Shannon Whirry isn't really worth immortalising in TFL's great pantheon of geek pin-ups - it's just that she happened to be getting her kit off when I was learning how to masturbate. If I had been a few years older, maybe I would be writing about former softcore-nonsense star Shannon Tweed. This is a good thing, however, as Shannon Tweed is really ugly.

Nonetheless, Ms Whirry seems to be getting regular work on TV these days, so avoiding the bored housewife fate of all her characters, so that's nice. If you still aren't convinced as to her geek credibility, she was in Steven Seagal's Out For Justice so some of you could beat off to that instead if you like.