Many great films just sneak up on you - their greatness comes from their quirkiness rather than textbook qualities -think cult classics of yesteryear like "King of Hearts" or "Harold & Maude". PT's "Bad Wives" is XXX porn but has those same indefinable elements that led to greatness -too bad IMDb voters give it a low rating for some similarly undefinable reasons.
Certain scenes are cryptic (notably an early pan down to the ground at an outdoor birthday party where we see a chunk of cake covered in ants) but once the reveal is provided we see that PT and his screenwriter Dean Nash are going after some big game thematically.
The ironic title does justice to its contents, as we witness a mini-rebellion by suburban housewives Dyanna Lauren and Melissa Hill against the constraints of suburban living. Their husbands are the enemy even though they aren't terrible at all, and the final reels become surrealistic as our heroines nearly morph into Patty Hearst-style armed combatants.
But the sex along the way is superlative and lead Lauren was never lovelier, with her figure a perfect 10 (while sidekick Hill is consistently sympathetic). The instigator of all this rumpus is a demon or perhaps the Devil himself wily played by Steven St. Croix at the top of his game.
What interested me most about such a classic, discovered nearly two decades later on my PT retrospective via DVD is the strange and unpredictable nature of the movie. Shot in 35mm it looks great but is not flashy or amounting to any big deal - checking it out at a middle reel you wouldn't be able to tell any immediate difference from a hundred other Thomas productions. But everything seems to work -the hallmark of mature artistry in cinema, and rarely encountered anymore.
With a new cast, a sequel was made by the creative team a few years after but it is way too obvious and didactic in its messaging. Randy Spears in ultra-smug mode takes over Steven's role and is explicitly the Devil, wearing a Zoot Suit no less! In the female roles are Raylene and April, whose sex scenes make that movie, but overall it comes off as silly compared to the original. Hopefully a new generation of porn will discover PT's magnum opus.