The name of this Amazon Prime drama is an obvious nod to E L James’ Fifty Shades of Grey series, but although aimed at the erotic-something-or-other market, Darker Shades of Summer isn’t a cheesy BDSM romance cum bit of rehashed Twilight fanfiction. It’s marketed as a dark thriller (because on TV, bad things always happen to kinky people). It takes a long time for the bad stuff to happen, mind you, and neither that (nor all the sexy times that precede it) is terribly engaging.
It is in fact, complete rubbish. But I pressed on anyway, and I’m going to share that experience with you. Mostly so that the time I spent watching it wasn’t entirely for nothing.
According to IMDB, this film also goes by the name of Desperate Housewife. It also has a picture of a film poster with someone who isn’t the film’s main character on it. This kind of muddle-headedness sums up this movie quite well.
The main character in the movie (if not necessarily the poster) is Summer (Danielle Scott), a housewife who is indeed desperate. She’s absolutely gagging for it, in fact. The movie starts with her wearing some very pretty lingerie and trying to seduce her husband, Dylan (Stephen Staley), but he’s having none of it because he’s too stressed out with work.
Right off the bat, we know how excruciatingly bad this film is going to be when Dylan promises Summer a nice trip away when work is less full-on.
“Until then,” he says. “My dick’s out of business.”
“That’s a shame,” replies Summer. “Because it’s a really good dick.”
Have I mentioned that the acting is really, really bad? Don’t worry if you forget; I will keep mentioning it.
So how to get Dylan’s dick back in business? Well, via a swingers’ retreat, obviously. Summer’s friend puts the idea in her head when she mentions that she’s taken up the swinging lifestyle and then Summer walks in on said friend and her new playmate having some grown-up fun and decides to stick around and watch for a bit.
She gets Dylan involved in her newfound love of voyeurism by whacking on some porn and inviting him to “watch me touch myself as I watch another couple”. The acting remains terrible, but the mutual wanking scene is quite fun. And then afterwards, when she suggests that they go to a swingers retreat, Dylan is quite up for the idea.
Very sensibly on the drive to the sex hotel, Summer discusses ground rules about anonymity and safe words. This is probably the last time anyone says or does anything vaguely sensible in this film.
At the sex hotel, we meet the staff, who are all surprisingly coy about what kind of resort it is. We also meet the host, Simon played by Mark Sears. Sears is by far and away the absolutely worst actor in an already bad bunch.
As the couples start to cringily mingle, I asked myself, not for the last time, why on earth I was actually watching this shit? If I want bad acting and bare bums, I could just watch some actual porn. I don’t think I ever managed to satisfactorily answer that question.
As the party continues, Dylan seems to be getting into it, but Summer is very uncomfortable. She’s very attracted to bad-actor-creep-boss-guy Simon. God knows why. He’s apparently some rich kid type who inherited the big house they’re all using.
But wait! Is all not what it seems? Is everyone being secretly filmed for some presumably nefarious purpose? Yes, yes they are. That’s made quite clear early on. It’s not even a spoiler. (Although there will be spoilers aplenty as this review progresses.)
Later on, there’s some kind of masked party which is a bit weird because there’s only like 10 people there and they all know each other. Anyway, they’re all shagging in the kitchen which is nice.
Summer overhears a conversation between bad-actor-boss-man Simon and someone on the phone who appears to be equally bad at acting even though all he needs to do is provide his voice. He is literally ‘phoning it in’. The two are discussing some video files that Simon has sent.
Summer is strangely unsuspicious of the whole business and proceeds to get shagged over the garden table by Simon.
The next bit of ‘plot’ involves someone overstepping the boundaries and doing non-consensual stuff. I think it might have been Mia-from-the-poster and Dylan-the-husband, but honestly, I was a bit confused about what was going on plot-wise by this point. We do see Mia with a black eye. “Men, eh?” she says resignedly to Summer. “They’re all the same.”
Simon and Summer’s relationship has sailed past ‘casually shagging to bring some spice back into one’s primary relationship’ and Simon tries to sow the seeds of doubt in Dylan’s mind by asking him if he thinks his wife loves him.
“She wants to stay here with me,” says Simon. Dylan whacks him with a pool cue. (They were playing pool at the time, by the way. He didn’t just go and get one specially.)
Given the all-round creepiness of Simon, it seems to me like a reasonable thing to do, but when Summer appears, she takes slimy Simon’s side.
Which is all very odd because Dylan seems quite nice. But maybe I’m just biased in favour of him because Stephen Staley can actually act.
Anyway, Summer does indeed elect to stay behind with Slimy Simon when Dylan leaves. There follows a montage of them romping on the beach, cuddling on the beach, fucking against walls etc. Doesn’t she have a job to go back to?
“One day,” she says, “I’m going to know all your secrets”.
“Maybe one day,” Simon slimily replies, “you will.”
Cunning bit of foreshadowing there.
(I’m not sure why I thought that particular nugget of dialogue was worth recording. It’s all as bad as that, to be honest.)
Later Summer catches Simon fucking another lady in the shower and gets all grumpy about it. “In our bathroom,” she pouts. “It’s supposed to be off-limits to guests.”
It all seems a bit petulant, really. Seriously, did she think they were exclusive?
When Simon first appeared, I had no idea that he was going to be such a significant character in this. He really can’t act at all, and it’s very distracting. I watched the two characters have an angry confrontation on the beach, and there was no sense of menace from the guy. The words he’s saying do not match his delivery. Although, to be fair to Mark Sears, he has at least put some effort into carefully memorising some words so that he can reel them off in the right order in his monotone delivery. Maybe somebody told him that was all he needed to do?
Summer is a very moody lady. It’s hard to believe that she’s got two blokes fighting over her. She decides to leave Simon. (I think this is because of the lady-in-the-shower thing. She’s upset that the man she met at a swingers’ resort, who owns and runs a swingers’ resort, is into swinging.)
This is where things finally step into ‘thriller’ territory. To prevent her from leaving, Simon plays video footage he’s made of her to blackmail her to stay in a “you know too much” way. Except that before she saw the videos, she didn’t know anything at all, except that he ran a sex resort – information that was presumably available on the internet, given that she managed to book the holiday in the first place.
Simon (whose real name, it turns out, is not Simon) then bludgeons and imprisons Summer and then sets about trying to murder her. Because, of course, you can’t have a kinkster in a movie who isn’t basically a monster. He really doesn’t seem to have a dark enough secret to warrant that reaction. He’s changed his name and secretly filmed some people? Yes, OK, that sort of thing is a bit frowned on legally but killing someone to keep it a secret seems like (literal) overkill.
Happily, Summer kills him first. I’m sure any jury in the land is going to believe her version of events, and it will be no problem.
Basically, this film is the age-old story: If you get into kink, it will inevitably turn out really, really badly.
We join Summer and Dylan for the epilogue three months after all that nastiness. She’s still into swinging, or sex work, or possibly making porn. Something like that. Anyway, it seems to have all worked out for her. And well, that’s that.
The end credits include the role of ‘Intimacy Coordinator,’ which is not something that you see in every movie, that’s for sure. It sounds like an interesting thing to have on one’s CV. However, the lady who performs that role – May Kelly – also plays one of the characters and is the production assistant to boot, so it’s clearly not a full-time job.
This movie gets a 2.5 rating out of 10 on IMDB which seems generous. But as one of the site’s user reviews puts it, “I couldn’t give them one star. At least they had a go.”