Boomer: I first saw A Night in Heaven on my 31st birthday, at Weird Wednesday in May of 2018, with a couple of friends. Jazmyne Moreno, who had programmed the film for that week, looked out over the audience and said, and I paraphrase, that she was surprised to see so few women and so many “burly men” in the audience (“bears” is the term she was looking for). Normally, when I tell this story, I follow that part up with a joke that this was followed by chants of “Show us the twink! Give us the twink!” from those in attendance, but that part’s purely fiction. Or is it? 

A Night in Heaven is a romantic drama that isn’t really all that romantic, or maybe it’s an erotic thriller that’s not quite thrilling, but either way, it’s … unique. Directed by John G. Avidsen seven years after he helmed Rocky and one year before the release of his next hit, 1984’s The Karate Kid (and as unlike either of those movies as you can imagine), the film tells the story of Faye Hanlon (Lesley Ann Warren), a teacher at Titusville Community College in Florida, one hour from Orlando. Her husband Whitney (Robert Logan) is a NASA rocket scientist and amateur recumbent bicycle designer at a career crossroads, finding himself being tasked with ballistic missile design instead of the astronomic rocketry about which he is passionate. Forming the third leg—no pun intended—of the love triangle at the center of the film is Rick Monroe (Christopher Atkins), a student in Faye’s speech class whose flippant attitude toward his final presentation leads her to give him a failing grade for the semester. That night, Faye and Rick’s paths cross outside of the classroom when her vacationing sister Patsy (Deborah Rush) drags her out to a male strip revue called Heaven, where she discovers that her student is an exotic dancer under the name “Ricky Rocket,” and they experience an intimate moment when he gives her a personal dance. 

Faye returns home horned up, and attempts to initiate sex with her husband, who turns her down and tells her that he’s been fired, leading Faye to wonder if there is a future for their relationship. Her feelings are further complicated by Rick’s ongoing flirtations with her as he tries to convince her to let him retake his final exam, and since her sister is staying at the hotel where Rick’s mother and sister work, they keep running into each other. She tries to avoid admitting her attraction to the younger man, but when Patsy has to go home a day early because her daughter is ill, she convinces Faye to stay the night in the paid-for hotel room rather than try to drive back late. Faye spends most of the night trying to reach her husband at home but there’s no answer (we see him reconnecting with a recently-divorced old flame that he runs into), and she ultimately ends up spending the night with Rick. An unwise phone call from Patsy, now back home in Chicago, leads Whitney to realize that his jealousy isn’t baseless, and he travels to the hotel. Faye realizes that she’s been used when she catches Rick in the shower with his girlfriend Slick (Sandra Beall), and it all comes to a head when Rick and Whitney have a confrontation. 

I don’t always feel the need to provide such a thorough recapitulation of a plot when we discuss a movie for this feature, but I did this time, since the Wikipedia plot summary is confused, to say the least. It cites that “Faye is going through a slump in her marriage to Whitney Hanlon, a rocket scientist who has just been laid off,” and that this is the reason that Patsy takes her out to Heaven to cheer her up, but that’s not the case. For one thing, it skips a few plot points ahead, given that there’s no real indication that the Hanlons’ marriage is on rocky ground at the outset, other than that Whitney’s been working nights and he can’t convince Faye to play hooky with him when she has finals to perform. The first indication of strife happens when Whitney isn’t interested in intimacy because of his firing, which Faye only learns about after coming back from the club. I’m not sure it’s the fault of the editor of that wiki page, however, as the film does seem to be missing a few plot points of its own – a fairly common issue with low budget films of this era. This is one of those movies that I feel probably had a more thoughtful script, since there are the vague outlines of something more nuanced and deeper going on at the edges.  Patsy’s description of the failures in her own marriage read like they’re supposed to echo something that’s happening in Faye’s marriage, but Faye’s issues are so vague that they don’t track. It also feels like we’re supposed to track that Whitney’s experiencing something of a crisis because he fears replacement in his relationship with his wife by a younger, sexier man while also confronting failure in finding a new job, citing “they hired a 14-year-old instead,” but again, it’s lacking. It’s not that the movie is just playing coy and being subtle, it’s more that there are gaps in the story, and that would be frustrating, if you come to the movie for that. Most people aren’t though; they’re here for the flesh. 

As thin and threadbare as the movie may be in other areas, one thing that it really has going for it is a striking soundtrack, which far outshines the film itself and has remained in the public consciousness for far longer. There are three undeniable bangers that were written specifically for this film, two of which are still pop culture touchstones while the third is (unfairly, in my opinion) largely forgotten. The first is the title track, which happens to be “Heaven” by Canadian singer-songwriter Bryan Adams, which plays in its entirety while Whitney rides his recumbent bike home after a night shift, creating some unintentional bathos. The song hit #9 on the Billboard charts with that release, and it also ended up on Adams’s album Reckless later that year, putting it back on the Billboard as the third single from the album, reaching #1 in April of 1985, completely eclipsing A Night in Heaven as far as cultural cachet and longevity. Perhaps almost as notable was the track “Obsession,” which was written and performed by Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight, and which was covered the following year by LA-based synth-pop band Animotion, becoming the biggest single of that band’s career, ensuring a pop culture legacy that’s more fondly (and more often) remembered than the film from which it spawned. Finally, I have a real fondness for “Like What You See,” which was composed by the film’s music supervisor Jan Hammer, a Czech-American composer with a long history of collaboration with a variety of household names like Mick Jagger and Carlos Santana. The track, performed by Hammer and the band Next, is a real treat, a peculiar blend of sultry and yacht rock-adjacent synths, and it’s undeniably sexy, even when it’s not paired with erotic dancing. 

What did you think? Did you like the soundtrack or was there a dissonance caused by the presence of much more famous music? Would you call this a romantic drama, an erotic thriller, or something completely different? 

Brandon: If I was at all distracted by the pop tunes plugged into the soundtrack, it was only in the immense difference in quality between the aforementioned “Heaven” & “Obsession” – respectfully, one of the all-time worst and one of the all-time best pop songs of all time.  Personal taste aside, as a pair they do exemplify what is so jarring about the movie’s volatile sense of tone, which alternates wildly from scene to scene.  “Heaven” represents its penchant for soft romantic melodrama, in which a troubled couple negotiates a rough patch in their marriage through teary-eyed phone calls and kitchen table heart-to-hearts.  By contrast, “Obsession” amplifies the erotically thrilling hedonism of the wife’s trips to the strip bar and her cuckolded husband’s parallel trips to the shooting range, an explosive recipe for sex & violence that thankfully only pays off on the sex end.  The way the film alternates between those two opposing tones can be a little clumsy, but the tension between them is also what makes the story so compelling.  Here we have the rare mainstream picture that sincerely engages with and markets to female sexual desire, tempting its timid protagonist to step outside the tedious complications and relative safety of her suburban marriage to enter a more dangerous, thrilling world of hedonistic excess.  In some ways, it softens the danger of her transgressions by making the object of her desire such a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his college professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter so I guess it all evens out. 

In a way, it’s incredible that a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper cinema, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print curio instead of a regular rowdy-screening cult favorite.  However, considering that Disney now owns the 20th Century Fox repertory catalog and there are several shots of the hot twink’s exposed peen, maybe it’s less incredible than it is just shameful.  There’s nothing especially vulgar nor raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front.  Still, it’s shocking to see a retro movie sincerely marketed to stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.  There’s a detectable relishment over the film’s financial & artistic missteps in its contemporary reviews (including a New York Times writer declaring it “Flashdunce”) that’s typical to most media that dares to market directly to women.  Hell, maybe even my aversion to Bryan Adams’s “Heaven” is a result of that extremely gendered form of cringe, which rejects feminine artistic aesthetics as automatically lesser-than.  It’s a tough habit to shake.  In hindsight, though, it’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club with a softcore porno title was marketed to that eternally underserved audience, even if only as a fluke inspired by the fad popularity of Chippendales male stripper shows.  The early exchange “I just flunked that kid,” “You did WHAT?” between girlfriends would have still been a mainstream-media novelty when Sex and the City was a zeitgeist changer two decades later, so it probably shouldn’t be surprising that America wasn’t ready to spend a night in Heaven when Reagan was still president.

Britnee: I am so grateful for being introduced to A Night in Heaven. This confusing mess of a movie is extremely entertaining, and I’ve already put rare DVD copies on my eBay and Mercari watchlists. I need this in my collection to watch over and over again. First off, I adore Leslie Anne Warren. Her performances in two of my favorite films, Victor/Victoria and Clue, are iconic, and she killed it as Susan Mayer’s mother, Sophie, in the Desperate Housewives series. She was perfect in the role of Faye, the conservatively dressed academic with a suppressed wild side. 

The question Boomer asked is the same question I had when I finished watching the film: “What genre is this?” It’s not romantic enough to be a romance. It’s also not purposefully funny, and not really erotic either. It’s a slightly sexy wholesome drama? I really don’t know the answer. All I know is that it’s a mystery that makes for a damn good time. The extended, pointless Bryan Adams bike ride really set the tone for what was to come! I laughed so much while singing along to “Heaven”. Yes, I’m a Bryan Adams fan, so I really enjoyed the soundtrack, especially the early original version of “Obsession”. That song is on just about every 80s mixed CD I’ve ever made. The soundtrack itself is a mixed tape that encapsulates everything the film does or is trying to do, and I think that’s wonderful.

What I wanted so badly was for Faye and Ricky Rocket to have multiple trysts and a stronger sexual connection with each other. The initial Ricky Rocket dance scene was insanely hot (and I watched it multiple times), but that was as strong as the tension between the two got. I wanted this to be more of a genuine age-gap romance like White Palace rather than a douche bag trying to get a passing grade by flirting with his professor. Why couldn’t Faye unleash her inner cougar with a young stud who was legitimately attracted to her? And then leave her boring husband for her new lover? I wanted this to be trashier, dammit!

Alli: Wow, maybe it’s my recent interest in trashy romance novels, or maybe it’s just from identifying strongly as a woman for most of my life, but I had a lot of fun with this. There’s a kitsch quality to it that directly hits my brain’s pleasure center: the straight laced, tight bunned school marm who’s secretly a hotty if she would only let down her hair; the nerdy husband who will do anything for her; the temptation, some kind of snake (wink wink, nudge nudge). It’s a parade of archetypes that just work. I can’t believe that this movie has somehow slid into obscurity, regardless of its pop songs. It just highlights the lack of cultural hype around movies about women’s pleasure and desires. (From what I’ve experienced on romance-novel-internet, books are not suffering from the same treatment somehow despite being far more numerous.) I hope that this Swampflix feature at least partly helps rectify that obscurity.

Something that really hit me, in terms of kitsch and lush texture, was the art direction and lighting. Yes, the changes in costumes mark shifts in character. Okay, now she’s the hot teacher because she let her hair down and put on a “racy dress.” Okay, look at these stripper outfits and how they differ from regular day to day. The night-time versus the daytime. Yeah, these shifts are obvious, but I love it. It’s so rare to see such blatant shifts outside teen make-over comedies. And the lighting here is perfect for it, especially the contrast between the regular classroom, office, daytime, household lighting versus the lighting in Heaven, where Ricky Rocket at one point literally has a Byzantine halo made of the colored lights above as he’s giving a lap dance. I was absolutely living for it.

As far as whether or not this is a romantic thriller or drama, it feels much more like a drama to me. Yeah, eventually a gun is involved, but it feels so minor compared to the switches between boring wife-dom and the straight woman paradise of Heaven. It plays so much more like a fantasy than a drama. Faye gets to have her cake (sleeping with Ricky when her marriage feels stagnant) and eat it too (going back to her husband with better communication and knowledge of her needs). The fact that she’s not punished for desiring a younger man is so refreshing. 

Lagniappe

Britnee:  I was surprised to see so much exposed man pubes here. Truly, A Night in Heaven walked so Magic Mike could run.

Alli: In a world full of male fantasies about big men hoarding guns, setting off explosions, and saving the world, we need more counter programming like this. We need more soft fantasies about young (of legal age) men desiring school teachers. Or, you know, just generally about women getting to explore their sexuality without drastic consequences. There’s a reason this is such a HUGE genre of literary fiction.

Brandon: I would like to personally welcome Jerri Blank’s stepmother, Deborah Rush, back to the Movie of the Month family after such a long hiatus following her early appearances in the screwball comedy Big Business and the cosmic horror The Box.  As a Strangers with Candy obsessive, I am so used to Rush being an ice-cold suburban terminator who “drinks to kill the pain” that I was shocked & delighted to see her bubblier 80s side as the sassy, squeaky sidekick here.  If y’all ever want to pivot this feature into a Deborah Rush Movie of the Month ritual instead, I am totally down.

Boomer: I’m very pleased that this one went over so well. This movie is disjointed—there’s no denying it—and its tonal inconsistencies could be a turn off, but I knew this would be this gaggle of freaks and weirdos to appreciate it. 

-The Swampflix Crew