DVD/Movie Review: The Hot Spot

 

The Hot Spot is a 1990 crime-drama combined with an erotic thriller directed by Dennis Hopper and starring Don Johnson, a young Virginia Madsen, and a very young Jennifer Connelly. Johnson plays Harry Maddox, a drifter who takes a job as a car salesman in a small town in Texas. When he learns that everyone who works at the town bank is a volunteer firefighter, he sets a fire to get everyone out of the bank so he can rob it. He is then blackmailed by the wife of the car dealership's owner (Madsen) with whom he is having an affair, despite falling for the secretary at the dealership, Gloria (Connelly) who is herself being blackmailed by a character played by William Sadler.

There are several editions of the movie out there, both on DVD and blu-ray. I have the DVD that is a French import, and the only extra on that version is a trailer for the movie. Some versions have cast interviews and a commentary track, so it will vary. One thing that you get from the import version versus the versions widely available in the US is that the sex scenes are less edited in the import version. They are not explicit, of course, but they tend to be longer and have less edited out. 

Overall, I would say that the movie is good, but not great. It is definitely a bit outdated now, and probably would not be made the same way today as it was then. There is a lot of sex and nudity, and pretty much everyone in the movie chain smokes throughout. So, it is not exactly family-friendly. It also happens to be the first (and only) movie in which Connelly has done a topless scene (and they are spectacular), but Madsen was topless much more in the movie than Connelly.