Hired by the philandering Baxter Reed (Bottoms) to care for his disabled wife, Jennifer (Valerie Wildman), Lynn - Roberts’ slinky nurse - is a brilliant character. Still, there are plenty of positives to atone for such missteps. It’s also stricken with a pair of unconvincing performances: one from Joseph Bottoms as an abusive hubby, another from Margaux Hemingway as Bottoms’ other woman. It’s not perfect: as with Mundhra’s opus, Inner Sanctum feels like the work of a director not yet completely comfortable with his material - though with Ray having expressed distaste for the erotic thriller trend in the years since, it’s a criticism that could be levelled at the bulk of the B-auteur’s more salacious output. While as interesting as Night Eyes in terms of the place it occupies within the erotic thriller’s cassette-based evolution (frequent Ray collaborator Jim Wynorski, for instance, cites it as a key influence on his own raunchy epics), Inner Sanctum is the better film. “It was on the front of the Wall Street Journal, and it out-rented Backdraft (1991).

“Inner Sanctum was extremely successful,” says Ray. Starring Night Eyes’ Tanya Roberts and released on tape fourteen months after Mundhra’s saucy trendsetter, Inner Sanctum was made for a paltry $650,000 and clawed in millions, becoming a blockbuster for distributor RCA Columbia Pictures Home Video. If the late, great Jag Mundhra’s Night Eyes (1990) was ground zero for the straight-to-video erotic thriller, then Fred Olen Ray’s INNER SANCTUM (1991) is the film that cemented the subgenre’s financial viability. Featuring commentary by the B-movie titan himself, Matty profiles the first four erotic thrillers directed by the mighty Fred Olen Ray.

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