Millicent (Peggy Steffans) invites a bunch of friends for a get together at her posh beach house. She soon sets out to pit her friends and their respective lovers against one another by using their desires, lust, and jealousy against them. As the week goes on, her manipulations intensify, pushing one poor schmo to the brink of murder.
Written and directed by Joe Sarno and released by Cannon long before their Golan-Globus days, Deep Inside is a bit of a slog. Your enjoyment of the film may depend on your tolerance of Steffans’ conniving character. She isn’t bad in the role, but Sarno does little to break up the sameness of the scenes where she plays her friends against each other. (Whenever the characters sneak off to cheat, it’s always accompanied by a shot of Steffans with a shit-eating grin. I swear if she had a mustache, she’d be twirling it.) It also doesn’t help that the supporting characters are mostly one-note. Plus, it’s hard to build up much sympathy for them when they are so easily led by her obvious ruses.
Sarno's movies (especially his early ones) are usually just as interested in sex as they are with the intricacies of the women and men (and the women and women) that have it. That ratio typically fluctuates from film to film. With Deep Inside, much of the concentration is on dull relationship drama that sometimes veers into soap opera territory. (It often plays like a bad Cassavetes film with occasional nude scenes.) These lapses can be forgivable if the acting is strong and/or the sex scenes are steamy. (I’m thinking specifically of Mary Mendum in Sarno’s Abigail Lesley is Back in Town.) As it is, the sex scenes in Deep Inside are tepid, mostly because the participants are so dreary. If they’re not having fun doing it, why should you have fun watching it?
The sole exception is the scene where some lesbians eat a peach before getting down to business. If the film had more sequences of this caliber, it might’ve been easier to overlook the more maudlin aspects. Ultimately, Deep Inside is a rather shallow experience.
AKA: Deep.
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