Wipe the sweat from your brow and wring out your sodden shirt with these ten uncomfortably hot and sweaty films…
I’m sitting here typing in the middle of a rare UK heatwave. We’re a nation more accustomed to four seasons in one day, who prefer to prepare for the cold with carpets and adequate heating, rather than hotter weather. Air conditioning, what’s that? A visit from your old friend, Betty Swallocks, isn’t welcome, but time in your local pub garden with a pint and a shady spot ain’t bad.
In cinema, you can terrify an audience, anger them (especially if you include anything that might be deemed ‘woke’), make ’em laugh, make ’em cry. You can also try to evoke a physical feeling of discomfort. Films set in the intense cold might leave an audience imperceptibly shivering.
Or you can stick your characters in the middle of intense heat. Some films won’t merely do this in a scene or two. Some will set the entirety of the movie in searing heatwaves or unbearably hot climates and atmospheres that leave the audience feeling the ick, clammy hands, and sweat so intense you can feel it in your eyeballs. Here are 10 of the most intensely hot and sweaty films ever…
The Surfer
The Nicolas Cage renaissance just does not seem to let up. Ever since Mandy re-perfected the crazy Cage formula, and with his finances seemingly more in control than those dark direct-to-video years where he said yes to everything, Cage has been more selective.
One of his most recent carefully selected gems is The Surfer, a quirky, surreal Ozploitation film with some David Lynchian touches as well as feeling very much in the vein of something like Wake in Fright.
Discomfort and intensity are the order of the day. Cage’s character just wants to surf but goes through an increasingly hellish descent to madness, pushed by a local cult of surfers headed up by an Andrew Tate-esque guru (played with exceptional skin-crawling relish by the late Julian McMahon). The biggest feeling that makes this film so intense is the dry, dizzying, thirst-inducing heat. I had to chug a bottle of water during and after this punishing experience (in a good way). Cage is superb too.
Wake in Fright
Speaking of Wake in Fright, the late Ted Kotcheff’s atmospheric and enveloping Oz thriller is a perfect example of a film that pulls you into its setting, even if ‘the Yaba’ feels like a sticky, sweaty and dreadful place to be.
John (Gary Bond) is a teacher on leave who gets stuck in a backwater, middle-of-nowhere town on his way to Sydney. Typified by dust, dirt and the gruelling heat, the locals cool off by getting soused on beer. He falls in with them, building up debts and becoming trapped. Dragged along to (horrifying) Roo hunts, drinking marathons and unspeakable black out acts with Donald Pleasance (who is brilliant).
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge
This divisive sequel may have veered too far from Wes Craven’s formula for many. In time, though, it’s taken on the moniker of being an essential addition to Queer horror cinema (with many split as to whether it embraces Queerness or the opposite). What the film (which has seen its popularity grow in time) also has going for it is a more intense psychological horror than the sequels, with Krueger becoming a personification of something else entirely. He also has one of the best looks the character has had on screen, appearing almost ghoulish and goblin-esque at times.
However, the most evocative part of this sequel is its fearsomely fiery atmosphere. It is relentlessly, uncomfortably sweaty with the entire film taking place in a heatwave, as well as placing its protagonist Jesse (Mark Patton) in searing boiler rooms, muggy gay bars and steamy shower rooms. You will definitely need a sweat rag and an ice-cold brewsky to make it through this one.
Dog Day Afternoon
Sidney Lumet’s masterpiece, based loosely on a real-life bank robbery gone wrong, just happens to be set on a sweltering summer’s day. Al Pacino and John Cazale are a pair of hapless heisters who end up having to take the bank employees and customers hostage after the job goes south.
Cue two sweaty crooks and their hostages struggling in a situation with inevitably, no happy ending. The heat pushes Sonny (Pacino), who struggles to keep it together as the ‘brains’ of the operation, while Sal (Cazale, who should have got an Oscar nomination at least) is always on the edge of a dangerous reaction as his simple, quiet presence masks a powder keg side.
Woman in the Dunes
An entomologist goes hunting for bugs on a hot day and falls into a sand dune. He finds a woman in a hut down there, but he becomes trapped, and there begins Woman in the Dunes, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s classic Japanese arthouse film.
Tasked with the perfunctory and repetitive daily acts of shovelling sand from the hut, his intimacy with the woman leads to an inevitable relationship. He longs to escape, despite her being resigned to staying. The constant barrage and presence of sand will leave you shaking out your damn shoes before you head out, and its persistent heat in combination just leaves you feeling itchy and sweaty. Despite all that, however, it’s a beautiful film.
Body Heat
A classic erotic neo-noir that really set a new era in the sub-genre. Body Heat paved the way for films like Basic Instinct and the many straight-to-video or Skinemax films of the 90s. With Hitchcockian touches mixed with the steamy sexuality already well known to European audiences, it also launched the career of Kathleen Turner, who is exceptional as the film’s femme fatale.
William Hurt is the slightly naive shyster drawn into a murder plot, blinded by his lust for the alluring wife of a wealthy businessman (Richard Crenna). Also starring a young Mickey Rourke.
Angel Heart
Speaking of Mickey Rourke, that brings us to another great neo-noir. These films always seem to benefit from the setting of heat and humidity. Rourke, as a slightly unkempt gumshoe tasked by the devilish Robert De Niro to find a missing musician, always seems to be dripping sweat through his dank, dirty suits.
Alan Parker’s dark, unsettling and atmospheric New Orleans-set thriller does have odes to Hitchcock, mixed with the intense psychological fragility of a protagonist who wouldn’t be out of place in a Bergman picture. The film drips sweat in every exquisitely shot frame, with a great soundtrack to boot.
12 Angry Men
Stick 12 jurors in a room and play your movie out across 90 minutes. Most times it wouldn’t work, with a film so confined in location and reliant on dialogue, you’d have to avoid every possible pitfall into easy exposition and adequately balance the main players.
However, this is Sidney Lumet at the helm with an exceptional cast headed up by Henry Fonda. One of the all-time great screenplays indeed helps, and the film is involving, engrossing and clammy. Seriously clammy. The jurors tasked with finding a unanimous verdict in a murder trial are all trapped in a room that might as well be a sauna. There’s more sweat in this than a classic Ron Jeremy flick.
Do The Right Thing
Spike Lee’s sensational third effort, set on the hottest day of the year in a melting pot Brooklyn neighbourhood. Tensions flare between racial groups as the eclectic cast of characters mingle, interact, and violence lingers like a looming shadow.
Everyone sweats and has to deal with the uncomfortable heat, with Lee’s wry observational humour, in a film that aesthetically pops with colour like an antithesis to his black and white debut, She Got Game. Those beautiful colours almost sweat, bleed and drip like Technicolour (shot by Ernest Dickerson), bolstered by great performances and a killer soundtrack.
Barton Fink
Here’s a great film where the inescapable irk of writers’ block finds beautiful cinematic symbiosis with relentless humidity. John Turturro is a playwright hired to become a screenwriter and conjure up a Wrestling B picture, holed up in a dire hotel with an oddball (John Goodman) in a neighbouring room.
The hot climate doesn’t help his creative drought, nor do his ventures out into intensely bright summer days to meet people (including a writing hero who turns out to be an abusive drunk). He’s drawn into Hollywood’s unscrupulous, uncaring frying pan and ends up in the literal fire when the seemingly affable Goodman’s salesman shows a hellish dark side. The hotel wallpaper loses its will to grip to the walls under the torrid summer heat. The Coens have often accentuated the climate of their films’ setting, from the ice and snow of Fargo to the similarly sweat-drenched atmospheres of Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and No Country For Old Men.
What’s the most uncomfortably hot and sweaty film you’ve seen? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Tom Jolliffe
