And that's without even mentioning the way that Exit to Eden pairs its damp love story with a comedy about two sharp LAPD officers trying to stop a diamond smuggler, which I understand to be the entire invention of screenwriters Deborah Amelon and Bob Brunner, a massively misguided add-on to the novel vampire maven Anne Rice wrote under a pen name. I think one could spend quite a long time trying to figure out what, on balance, is the worst thing about the film: its deeply unerotic eroticism, or its more deeply unfunny comedy. The sex scenes are more boring, anyway.
So let's meet our two threads, anyway. The first starts in Australia, in 1974, where a young boy named Elliot Slater (Brian Davila) purposefully gets himself in trouble so the family's busty French maid (Rajia Baroudi) will angrily spank him. 20 years later, the grown-up Elliot (Paul Mercurio) still loves to be punished, but he's had a difficult time articulating that to his potential lovers, which is why he has applied for a most singular program. His friend, Dr. Martin Helifax (Hector Elizondo) is the proprietor of a private island of the coast of Mexico, Eden, which is a combination retreat/therapy center for the personal exploration of sexuality as it relates to domination and submission. Elliot has passed the apparently rigorous psychological profiling necessary to travel to become a "Citizen", or submissive partner, there to be able to live out all his fantasies of being smacked, yelled out, and ordered around.
Meanwhile, Sheila Kingston (Rosie O'Donnell) and Fred Lavery (Dan Aykroyd), partners on the Los Angeles police force, are hot in pursuit of Omar (Stuart Wilson), a mysterious jewel thief who has never been photographed or described, and his right-hand henchwoman, Nina Blackstone (Iman). The first we meet Sheila and Fred, they're disguised as, respectively, a dancer and a DJ at a strip club, which is what we call "foreshadowing" in the screenwriting business. Clomping around in her boa, waving a gun, Sheila cuts in with the first wave of a nightmarishly persistent pattern of voice-over to snottily joke, "I'm a cop. Thought I was a supermodel? Don't feel bad, everyone makes that mistake". Because, you see, Rosie O'Donnell is a disgusting fatty who nobody would ever find sexy. That's the least fair kind of joke ever - and circa-1994 O'Donnell is pretty damn good-looking by every human standard outside of the mainstream American film industry - and Jesus Horatio Christ, is Exit to Eden ever ecstatic to exploit her purported hideousness, standing back with arms wide open to let in all the guffaws as this ungainly, graceless, tart-tongued woman talks like somebody who could possibly be found sexual desirable, en route to putting her in a snug leather bustier from which she pokes out in all the wrong places. It would be infinitely more dispiriting if O'Donnell's performance wasn't so brittle and arch and thus felt like it was feeding the meanspirited humor even more than the script already would have it.
The stories cross paths when Elliot quite inadvertently snaps a photo of Omar in the act of pulling out a packet of black market diamonds, on his way to Eden. The criminals are thus after him, and the cops chase both the criminals and Elliot's film cans, and so everybody ends up on Eden: Elliot to find himself quite besotted by headmistress Lisa (Dana Delany), Nina to enjoy life as a sexually predatory gorgeous woman, Omar to stand around grousing, Sheila to shoot off zingers followed by zingy observations about how everybody is a people, even the ones who like BDSM, and Fred is miserable and uncomfortable and obliged to pretend that he's a janitor to avoid having to partake of the sexuality in any way.
Picking out the worst thing about Exit to Eden is prohibitively hard, but a strong candidate would have to be that awful fucking voiceover, which O'Donnell delivers in a speedy staccato that obviously wants to evoke terse narration of film noir - which it doesn't - only in way that's sassy and robustly comic - which it isn't. Another strong contender would be the absolutely impossible performances given by Delany and Mercurio (the latter having only ever appeared in one film, the sweet-minded "wacky Aussies" comedy Strictly Ballroom, where his callowness and artificial mien were used to more stable effect), stilted and inhuman, so devoid of human warmth that when they doff their clothes to make out and have simulated sex that Marshall and company shoot with a kind of delighted "naughty child peeking between interlaced fingers" remove, it's a little surprising that you can't hear the plastic parts squeaking as they rub together. Seriously, nobody gives a good, or even halfway functional performance in the film (except for Iman, maybe, who also has the broadest major role), but even by the lowered standards here, Delany is shockingly inauthentic and forced. There is no pleasure here, nor self-reflection, nor even a particularly strong command of the English language, based on some of her line readings.
To be fair, Delany is particularly ill-served by the genial comic tone that Marshall spackles onto everything, since hers is the most serious of all roles. Aye, the comedy, that's another thing going spectacularly wrong: at its best, it's desperately obvious and corny, and sometimes it gets worse and adds tone-deaf tastelessness on top of it (e.g. O'Donnell's cringing parody of Iman's speaking voice; the running gag wherein Sheila mocks Fred by loudly describing her period). But the really awful thing is how the broad, surface-level humor collides with the frequent nudity and frank sex talk, reducing everything the braying world of particularly filthy burlesque. It's a leering, dirty movie, though I think entirely by accident; Marshall is not a leering filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination (think of how successfully he denuded the R-rated prostitute comedy Pretty Woman of any genuine sexual edge), just one who wants to make things as safe and accessible to the most basic mainstream audience. In applying that mentality to the defiantly un-mainstream world of BDSM, the perhaps inevitable effect is to titter at it with embarrassment, to linger on it and make it seem outright smutty. I have no stake in the behaviors being depicted onscreen; I do however, prefer not to have to deal with the confusing mental anguish of such featherweight jokes being steamrolled by such crass depictions of clearly artificial fucking.
All of this coalesces into a completely unacceptable, unwatchable cinematic object: only a handful of times does a joke manage to spark enough to generate any kind of energy, and it sputters out again the second that either plot clicks through another generic event, or any of the actors cough up another line through palpable self-loathing (Aykroyd), dogged determination to make anything out of this hellacious mess (O'Donnell), or just plain ineptitude (everyone else). It's a movie whose insipidity keeps being sharpened with every new wrinkle, every new line, and every new banal bit of staging; it feels like the flatness of it all should end up turning into anesthetic mush, but no, Exit to Eden keeps finding new ways to inflict pain. Just like its characters, only there is nothing all pleasurable involved in this act of sadism.
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