'Def by Temptation'

Yesterday we made an Aztec (or Mayan, I'm rubbish at remembering which one's which!) Sacrifical Temple Cake. With gummy bears as the Aztecs and jelly babies as the helpless conquistadors being sacrificed. It was a delicious day :)


It was a follow up to our earlier project, the Gingerbread Fortress of Doom, but in this instance we actually made almost all the parts of the structure rather than using a gingerbread house kit.

So, while we were doing this, we had to have some rubbish film going on in the background because watching 'The Princess and the Frog' meant we didn't get the baking started till around 3:30 (it's a good film, though). One of our number of creative cooks has a wonderful ability to collect really random bad horror films, so we put on the dreadful 'Def [sic] by Temptation'. It has Samuel L. Jackson in, somehow.


I don't really feel I can review it properly as we didn't get through it, but 'Def by Temptation' (1990, Troma Films) concerns a succubus/vampire preying on lecherous gentlemen. My friend originally bought this (very cheaply) because it a) looked awful and b) had Samuel L. Jackson in. Well, we reckon Mr Jackson owed someone involved with this film some money, because he is in it for five minutes, during which time he shouts a blood and hellfire sermon, is threatened by the succubus and then dies in a car crash. It's...terrible. Like, really terrible. It's directed, written and produced by James Bond III, the main characters (James Bond, played by James Bond III) and Kadeem Hardison have massive chunks of completely irrelevant dialogue that presumably Mr Bond thinks is deep (including a section about how amazing New York is because "y'know, everyone's a character", kill me now).

The scenes where the succubus kills people are high on the softcore and disappointingly low on the gore. Cynthia Bond is very game as the 'temptress', but the reason we gave up on this film was that, despite having more murders per hour than a lot of modern films, it was unbearably boring. So we can't really put forward a reasoned judgement, and judging by the Wikipedia article on 'Def by Temptation', the pace presumably picks up after the bit we watched, in order to fit all the action described (which would have made it rather more exciting). The article reads like James Bond III himself may have written it, as I'm pretty sure the film itself wasn't that coherent. Essentially: disappointing, even as a bad film, due to the director/writer/producer's pretensions to something more than a trashy mess. Characters were introduced and murdered before we got to know them, and I honestly couldn't care less what happened to the ones who stay alive more than five minutes. The plot is surprisingly coherent, but I suspect that's only because there isn't much of it. Overall, avoid. Like 'Blue Blood', it has much promise as a trashy treat, but never comes close to living up to it. And unlike 'Blue Blood', 'Def by Temptation' doesn't even have Derek Jacobi wrapped in a tennis net and sacrificed by Satanists (note that the Wikipedia article on 'Blue Blood' refers to an entirely different, and probably better film).