A strong case could be made for Alfred Hitchcock as the father of the erotic thriller: He might not have invented it, but he certainly perfected and legitimized it, paving the way for hundreds of trashy B-movies like Mercy. Directed by Damian Harris with tons of Hitchcock-by-way-of-Basic Instinct flashiness but no psychological insight, Mercy stars Ellen Barkin as a tough detective whose troubled personal life is explained by her willingness to consent to degrading sex with a random Baldwin. Assigned to track down a brutal serial killer, Barkin soon finds herself immersed in a shadowy subculture of gorgeous, uniformly feminine lesbians prone to pouting and posing seductively, as if watched by an unseen army of male masturbators. La Femme Nikita star Peta Wilson serves as Barkin's emotionally scarred guide to this dark underworld of lipstick lesbianism, attempting to seduce the grizzled homicide vet but succeeding only in embodying Howard Stern's adolescent-fantasy perception of what lesbianism is really about. An exploitative thriller so creepy it should come in a plain brown wrapper, Mercy exploits a wide range of sexual kinks, from bondage to sadomasochism to role-playing, without using them as anything other than exceptionally sleazy plot points. Filled with dime-store Freudianisms and dialogue that would embarrass Joe Eszterhas, Mercy aims for the sophisticated kink of Hitchcock but falls short of Brian DePalma at his self-indulgent worst.