Intimate Betrayal Reviews

Softcore schlock, INTIMATE BETRAYAL is neither erotically nor dramatically charged as it examines the games played by two friends whose friendship ended when both fell in love with the same woman. At his stag party the night before he is to marry Katie (Jessica Hecht), Mack (Dwier Brown) is suprised when his estranged friend Charlie (Richard Edson) crashes the festivities. Now a novelist living in LA, Charlie has returned home to seek revenge on Mack for stealing Katie from him. Unaware of this, Mack allows Charlie to wait in his house for the arrival of Shelley (Cristi Conaway), supposedly his girlfriend but actually a prostitute he has hired to seduce Mack. She does so, causing Mack to call off the wedding just as Katie arrives. Charlie makes a play to win back the confused Katie, who admits she cares about both men. Charlie's plan is exposed when Shelley confesses everything to Katie. Katie spurns both Charlie and Mack; Mack launches a campaign to win her back. Wounded by Mack and Charlie's selfishness, Katie concludes that their nonsexual bond of friendship supersedes their connection to her. As the two men work out their feelings of regret and betrayal, Katie leaves them both, knowing she'll always be second best in their estimation. Maybe what makes INTIMATE BETRAYAL so grating is the fact that it does offer some insight into the mystique of male bonding, that camaraderie for which women need not apply. The problem is that this idiotic movie seems to embrace that male pathology even as it supposedly condemns it. According to this appalling, irritating film, the ultimate mortal sin is the deception of one buddy by another. Infidelity, jilting, failure to commit to a woman are only tangential offshoots of that unforgivable transgression. Rather than analyze or satirize this preoccupation of masculine behavior, INTIMATE BETRAYAL buys into it. It's impossible to care about Mack, who blames everyone but himself for his fallibility in cheating on Katie. Are we supposed to envy Charlie's retribution when it clearly reveals that his emotional development stopped at the level of playground bully? Neither clever nor sexy, this mattress melodrama observes two men behaving badly, yet seeks our sympathy as it suggests that Mack is a bigger pig than Charlie. He isn't. INTIMATE BETRAYAL inadvertently reveals more about sexism and misogyny than it intended to. (Violence, extreme profanity, substance abuse, nudity, sexual situations.)