Review: They’re Playing With Fire

Literature professor Sybil Danning (!) seduces college student Eric Brown for the purpose of convincing him to help her and husband Andrew Prine (also a professor) in the task of scaring Prine’s elderly mother and grandmother out of the house that Prine and Danning want for themselves. He is supposed to pretend to be a burglar, but botches the job and runs away. Then the two old ladies turn up dead – murdered. And somebody’s responsible! (Yes, I did just quote “Plan 9 From Outer Space”). Paul Clemens and Dominick Brascia turn up as college students.

 

Eric Brown is back for more “Private Lessons”, but this similarly-themed film from 1984 isn’t really related to that infamous Sylvia Kristel outing. This time it’s Sybil Danning playing the sexy teacher (a massive upgrade in my eyes), the student is in college, and the tone/plot is darker. Other than that, it’s largely the same student/teacher sex film deal. Directed by Howard Avedis (the early Bill Paxton film  “Mortuary”) and very poorly written by Avedis and his wife Marlene Schmidt (who also co-wrote “Mortuary”), this kind of thing hits differently from a 2024 point-of-view and it may not be easy for some to contextualise. Some might not feel this kind of subject matter even deserves contextualisation. I’m not sure I can disagree with that except to say that the student this time is at least of college age and the teacher is not painted virtuously at all. Therefore the relationship has inappropriate power dynamics but nothing paedophilic at least. There is however the ick factor of the late Dominick Brascia being in the cast and if you’ve heard what Corey Haim’s mother has to say about him, you might find it hard to watch anything with him in it, especially about this kind of subject. So there’s still a little bit of discomfort from a 2024 perspective in the film.

 

More importantly for a film review, it’s also just a bad film and that’s where I’ll take things now. Even “My Tutor” had more merit to it than this poorly made exploitation film. I’ll be honest, Sybil Danning was my sole reason for checking this one out and she’s the sole good thing here, both her performance and her physical attributes. I’m not sure I buy her as an academic necessarily but she works in every other facet of the character. The script is absolutely abysmal. It’s like the whole thing is on 10x speed here. Brown gets to see Danning in a bikini 5 minutes into the film, 8 minutes in and they’re already fornicating, and 12 minutes in the central plot/scam is already revealed. This thing is in a rush to nowhere and it completely deflates any tension or interest one might’ve had in anything outside of seeing Sybil Danning naked. Within 15 minutes we’ve already been introduced to both of the major plot points here and the third addition of a killer/mystery ultimately ends up pretty arbitrary and uninteresting. Almost an hour in and this thing has turned into a horror film as a person dressed with Santa bashes a girl to death. So we’re awkwardly trying to bring in two separate exploitation movie crowds here, the sexploitation crowd and the slasher lovers. Unfortunately Avedis and Schmidt have no idea what they're doing and even the mystery doesn’t come off.

 

This is stupid and badly scripted. If you want to see Sybil Danning naked you’ve got the internet and several other movies for that. A total botch and best forgotten.

 

Rating: D+