Updated paraphrase of James M. Cain (never really outdated), to do with a handsome young drifter, a fishmonger with a bad heart, and the latter's unsatisfied wife. Between the first-person voice-over ("It's amazing the way you get into things"), the lonely muted trumpet during the credits, and the Young Brando apery of Arie Verveen, it isn't, on second glance, all that up to date. And it could have used more visual style from director Robert M. Young, of whatever vintage. The sex, however, is suitably dirty, beginning with the gross suggestiveness of the "boning," and then fingering, of a shad. And there is already a hint of incest in the illicit affair of the older woman and her surrogate son, before the actual, biological son bursts through the front door for a surprise visit, right when the surrogate has his head beneath the mother's skirt. (Cunnilingus interruptus.) The son's greeting for his mother: "I could eat you!" Steven Schub is grotesquely mesmerizing as the son, an abrasive would-be standup comic with the stage name of Danny Dime, a drug problem, and justified paranoid tendencies. Edward James Olmos, Maria Conchita Alonso, Bitty Schram. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd