Fucking Day: Exit To Eden

Garry Marshall wanted to direct Fifty Shades Of Grey and we should have let him. There, I said it. It's out of the way. If Garry Marshall had made the Fifty Shades Of Grey movies he might have found a way to make them at least slightly sexier and certainly way less boring. How do I know? Because I watched Exit To Eden, the Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Akroyd-helmed 1994 BDSM sex comedy based on a book written by Anne Rice.

Almost everyone involved in making this movie is actively and publicly ashamed of it. It's got the saddest IMDB trivia page ever. All of the movie trivia is, "Garry Marshall says he wishes he never directed this movie!" "Rosie O'Donnell has said many times that this movie is terrible!" "Dan Aykroyd wishes he could forget about making this movie!" Anne Rice originally published the book under a pseudonym, and after the movie came out, I'm pretty sure she wanted to slap that fake name right back on, and I don't blame her.

Anne Rampling's Exit To Eden was not at all a comedy. It was an erotic novel exploring the romantic relationship that develops between a professional dominatrix and a submissive photographer named Elliot Slater on an exclusive BDSM sex island. By the way, Anne Rice was kind of obsessed with BDSM sex retreats. She wrote multiple erotica series around that theme. It turns out her vampire books are the Anne Rice children's collection.

Exit To Eden, the movie, is actually two movies smushed together and forced to kiss (while someone else watches and whips them a little bit). Garry Marshal had just made Pretty Woman, and Anne Rice's vampire books were popular. I guess he thought he could stick some zany cops into Exit To Eden, and it would be an automatic hit. He was wrong. Imagine going to see a silly Rosie O'Donnell movie and watching a man erotically rub butter and cinnamon on a woman's breasts and lick it off. Imagine going to see the adaptation of a famous BDSM love story and finding Dan Aykroyd there. These two great flavors do not go great together.

The movie opens with our romantic hero as a child being punished by his hot French maid. She spanks him, and the camera zooms in on his face, enjoying it. This kind of scene could only exist in the context of 1994. Here's the screenshot presented without comment.

Thank God we quickly flash forward to Elliot's adult years, where he's interviewing for a spot on an exclusive BDSM sex island, but he's being kind of a dork about it. He's unwilling to admit to any actual fetishes. He wants to go to the island out of curiosity and fears his past relationships haven't worked out because he hasn't been honest about his desires. Elliot always acts kind of shocked to find himself on the BDSM sex island, even though it's made extremely clear how hard it is to get there. Apparently, he went into a fugue state for physicals, blood tests, a psychological exam, and a thorough interview process.

Now here's the part of the movie that Garry Marshall added to make it a comedy: before Elliot got on the sailboat to sex island, he accidentally took the only known photograph of the most dangerous diamond thief in the world. He's a diamond thief that Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O'Donnell are trying to track down through a series of elaborate undercover missions the LAPD is willing to fund for some reason.

Straight-laced Dan Aykroyd and slightly less straight-laced Rosie O'Donnell have to hunt Elliot on the sex island. Here's the thing about this plot line. All of the fish out-of-water fun is sucked out of the film by the fact that they're trying too hard to be cool about BDSM. It feels like someone Garry Marshall liked asked him not to make fun of the BDSM community, so Rosie O'Donnell's character is never freaked out by anything. Her submissive offers to suck her toes, and she's just like, "Thanks, but I'll pass," and it's a nice consensual interaction. Was that funny in 1994? Were we just supposed to find it funny that anyone finds Rosie O'Donnell attractive? Because the people in the film seem to think she is fat despite being a size eight at most, probably a six. I have no clue where the comedy was even supposed to be, is what I'm saying.

Back on the sex island, Elliot and the other submissives are ordered to strip down to nothing but shiny golden thongs for their introductions to the doms. He's shocked that sex happens on sex island, and he decides to make kind of a joke out of it by twerking and posing in a goofy way. We see more boobs than I thought possible in a rated-R movie, as well as Elliot's whole butt. It's a pretty decent butt, and I think that was their only casting requirement because, let me tell you, Elliot could not act. I've never been more surprised in my life than when I found out Paul Mercurio is actually Australian. I thought he was doing a bad Australian accent, but it turns out he was just fully bad at talking.

Paul Mercurio was largely known as a choreographer before this film, but instead of having him dance in the movie (famously sexy), they made his hobby rollerblading (famously super dorky). There's a long, mostly nude rollerblading sequence in this movie, and it is honestly a good reason to tolerate the other seventy-five minutes of the film. I'm getting ahead of myself.

At the auction, we're introduced to Elliot's love interest, Mistress Lisa, the headmistress of sex island. She decided to personally train Elliot to be a submissive because she thinks he will be a difficult case. Elliot is sent to her room where she makes him bathe her, shave her legs, and brush her hair. When she catches him looking longingly at her silver hair brush Mistress Lisa suddenly realizes how to fix Elliot by spanking him.

Lisa gives Elliot permission to enjoy being spanked, and it allows him to get over the BDSM shame that was holding him back in relationships. Mistress Lisa gives Elliot permission to sleep on the floor of her room, but in the middle of the night, she has a sex dream, and Elliot ends up going down on her, which, for some reason, is life-changing. Maybe I'm crazy but I feel like the literal queen of sex island has probably enjoyed a little oral sex from time to time. It feels like the movie thinks Elliot going down on Lisa is more foreign and strange than Elliot getting suspended from the ceiling with bungee cords, blindfolded, and spanked.

Hey, did you forget that this movie is at least 40% about Rosie O'Donnell trying to bust some diamond thieves? Yeah, me too, because that plot has almost nothing to do with Elliot and Lisa, who are blissfully falling in love while sex shenanigans happen around him. The diamond thief, Omar, and his partner, the supermodel Iman, arrive on the sex island at the same time as Rosie O'Donnell, also disguised as dominants. Here is Iman in her dominatrix gear as a treat.

We get some cut scenes of the thieves and cops enjoying the island. Iman is living her life, riding around on people like horses, having shower threesomes, regular Iman-on-a-sex-island stuff. Omar is really mean to his sub for no reason. Rosie O'Donnell politely turns her sub down and asks a random man on the island to paint her house. They thought the house painting line was so hilarious it was the punchline of their heavily marketed trailer. The island doctor tells everyone that Dan Aykroyd (who's posing as a maintenance man) has an enormous penis, and they all start calling him big boy. None of this is funny. What is funny is Elliot rollerblading for Mistress Lisa's affection.

Mistress Lisa tries to avoid Elliot after their intimate night, but Elliot forces her to pay attention to him by winning a rollerblading competition where the first prize is a night alone with her. Elliot tells her that he loves her and they should get off the island and see if they could work as a real couple by going on a vacation to New Orleans. This makes perfect sense, so they go to New Orleans, and Lisa reveals that she's growing tired of the day-to-day grind of running sex island. Omar hires a man very specifically named Latte Chavez to follow Lisa and Elliot and report on their movements. He, too, gets a plane off of the sex island and arrives just in time to New Orleans to interrupt Lisa and Elliot as they fuck in the middle of a plantation museum house.

A fight scene ensues that culminates in Rosie O'Donnell showing up to shoot Omar after a brief scuffle with Iman in their BDSM gear. Why did they move the entire production off the island and to New Orleans for this climactic finale? I'm pretty sure it was just for an awkward nod to the Anne Rice connection. It's one of the clunkiest transitions of the movie. There are three separate scenes where we have to pause and explain how three different groups of people left the island. There's the entire unnecessary character of Latte Chavez, who's in three scenes, and they say his name in every single one because Garry Marshall clearly loved it.

How could this movie possibly end with anything less than a shooting and a BDSM proposal? After defeating Omar, Lisa freaks out because she meets some women at the police station who have bad boyfriends, and she thinks she always needs to have total control of her relationships. She retreats from New Orleans to the safety of her sex island queendom. Elliot manages to change her mind by sneaking into her spanking contraption while wearing a full tux and proposing.

After a brief pep talk from Rosie O'Donnell about what a great guy Elliot is (they met once) Lisa decides that she and Elliot can have it all, "bondage and babies." Rosie O'Donnell ends up getting together with her submissive, who is a CEO in real life. Dan Aykroyd invites his ex-wife to New Orleans so he can bang her with a Hitachi Magic Wand that he bought on the island. "In this BDSM comedy, everybody gets a happy ending," would have been a way better tagline for the film.

When I turned off this movie my first thought was, "Garry Marshall knows how to fuck." Some of the sex scenes aren't bad! Which is actually bad for the movie because horny and funny are a surprisingly tricky combo to meld. So I guess, in conclusion, the biggest problem with this movie is that Garry Marshall was too erotic. RIP to a fucking king.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ozzie Olin, yet another one of Anne Rice's pseudonyms.

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