Roman Polanski’s 1962 debut feature Knife In The Water is a thriller of explosive simplicity, confining a fractious couple and a mysterious hitchhiker to a boat and allowing the setting to serve as a pressure cooker for sexual and psychological tension. Two men, one alluring woman, and a knife: What more does a movie need? With his 1975 knockoff Waves Of Lust, Italian exploitation maestro Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust) provided an answer to that rhetorical question: A second woman and a lot more casual nudity and sex. All the suppressed erotic tensions of Polanski’s film become, in Deodato’s unofficial version, a bonanza of softcore coupling of nearly every variety, only occasionally broken up by halfhearted stabs at politics and suspense. Deodato would get better at adding more nuance to the exploitation game—his immediate follow-up, Live Like A Cop, Die Like A Man, potently reworked the crime picture by offering a sadistic Starsky & Hutch duo as its antiheroes—but Waves Of Lust certainly gets the basic job done.
