Big bang theory
Among movies that will be difficult to explain to future generations Crimes of Passion is lying around like an unexploded bomb in Twitter's basement. Anything by Ken Russell would do it, really. Kids reference The Devils because they think it's naughty horror but the scary part is it's not: it's just Ken. The literal explosions in his work are ludicrous and funny until you remember that as a child the director witnessed his cousin Marion blown to pieces when they were playing in a British field and she stood on a landmine.
Released in 1984, Crimes of Passion predates the body horrors of Se7en and trails De Palma's gaudiness (the soundtrack by Rick Wakeman does not help). Kathleen Turner remembers making the movie:
I have always thought Crimes of Passion was a very powerful film - some of my best work I think. Not an easy job though. Antony Perkins I can say because it was common knowledge on set was doing god knows what drugs and Ken at that time was still drinking heavily. So that created difficulties that didn't need to have been there. I walked into Ken's trailer at 6 o'clock in the morning and was asked if I wanted a glass of wine. No thank you, Ken.
The movie was written by Barry Sandler whose screen credits include dramatisations of Agatha Christie's The Mirror Crack'd (1980) and Evil Under the Sun (1982). Says Sandler:
I tend to deal with certain themes in all my work and I’ve always been fascinated by masks and facades and the disguises we wear. But in terms of Crimes it’s certainly the most transgressive approach I’ve taken. In a way I was tapping into what was going on around me during the eighties, it was just at the beginning of the advent of the AIDS crisis... people had difficulties with their relationships, there was a lot of sex going on and it was very easily accessible and a lot of people were using it as kind of an excuse or a defence or a rationale or some way to avoid intimacy, to avoid relationships.
... [Ken Russell] was most intrigued by the China Blue/Shayne scenes. The scenes with Kathleen and Tony. And that kind of high-pitched almost surreal interplay fascinated him, dealing with themes of masks and facades, illusions and deceptions, with these two outrageous characters going at each other. He was less intrigued with the other aspect of the film which was the Grady home life. He wasn’t really connected into that world, into the American suburban idiom, so I think those scenes were less interesting to him than the scenes which were more outrageous, which were more Ken Russell kinds of scenes. He was interested in the themes inherent in the conflict between China Blue and Shayne.