In Fascination, Adam Garcia plays a sullen child of privilege who broods, sulks, and plots ineffectual revenge after his father dies under mysterious circumstances and his mother quickly marries a malevolent usurper with sinister designs on the family fortune. But while the film's outline recalls a certain classic tragedy about a melancholy Danish prince, its execution brings to mind the sleaziest opuses of Zalman King, the once and perhaps future monarch of lascivious softcore spectacles like Wild Orchid and Two Moon Junction.
In a role that's a long way from the class and restraint which characterized his breakout film Coyote Ugly (as well as his more low-profile gig as the voice of Kangaroo Jack's sassy marsupial), Garcia plays the whiny, oft-shirtless son of Jacqueline Bisset, whose wet T-shirt in 1977's The Deep helped usher an entire generation of squeaky-voiced teens into puberty. Bisset still qualifies as far sexier than the film's ostensible sexpot, Alice Evans, who portrays Garcia's new step-sister/lover in a performance that truly has to be seen to be disbelieved. Nearly everything about Fascination feels overdone. At its delirious worst, it's as pungent a Parisian cheese shop, offering a cornucopia of laughable scenes, from a watery cunnilingus session that plays like a deranged cover of Elizabeth Berkley's seizure-like thrusts in Showgirls to a howler in which Garcia asks a buddy to help him dig up his dad's grave for a toxicology report.
There are far too many moments of unintended merriment in Fascination to recount, but it'd be a shame not to mention the film's crowning moment of idiocy, in which its young lovers just barely survive a harrowing, nearly fatal automobile accident, take a few seconds to ascertain that they're not dead, and then immediately have sex. Fascination contains a lot of sexual gymnastics, but they're more uncomfortable-looking than erotic. This is largely due to the deeply irritating presence of Evans, who'd probably turn a few heads at the typical office party, but falls far short of the bombshell standards of classic femmes fatale. She's no Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth. For that matter, she's not even a Shannon Tweed or a Shannon Whirry, although Fascination wouldn't feel out of place in the Cinemax-ready filmography of either actress.