This Melanie Griffith Starring 90s Romcom Was So Creepy, It Would Never Be Made Today
Well, to be fair, making this movie was a mistake in the first place, even back in the 90s. And Melanie Griffith probably wants to forget she was in it.
Even though this romcom was made during the darkest period of her career, when she starred in a string of flops after the success of Working Girl (1988) and Pacific Heights (1990), she received three Golden Raspberry Awards and three nominations within the next six years.
But what movie could be considered particularly embarrassing against such a record?
Milk Money (1994), of course, a creepy, cringy mix of romcom and family film that was bad to begin with and has only become worse with time.
In his review of the film, famed critic Roger Ebert wrote: "I would give anything within reason to see 'The Making of 'Milk Money'' - or, for that matter, just to listen to the tapes of the executives' story conferences.
And no wonder, because it is completely unclear who the target audience for this mess of a movie was. It's as if the screenwriters wanted to make a sex comedy about horny teenagers in the vein of American Pie (1999) - but were told that the studio didn't want a PG-13 rating when filming was about to begin. So they tried to turn it into a wholesome family movie on the fly.
The premise of Milk Money .... looks questionable. Three junior high school boys pool their pocket money to go from their suburb to the big city and pay a hooker to see a naked woman (hence the movie's title). They find a sex worker who calls herself V, played by Melanie Griffith, who agrees to give them what they want.
Then, through a series of coincidences far too contrived even by Hollywood standards, V ends up going back with them to their suburb and becomes romantically entangled with the father of one of the boys. All the while, she is being pursued by a murderous mob collector - not because the mob doesn't like their sex workers getting away, but for some other contrived reason.
Milk Money is just a poorly made movie that does a poor job of mixing genres and manages to be both prudish and offensive at the same time.
If the nudity had been more gratuitous and the language more foul, it would have looked more like a comedy made in the 2020s. But at the same time, its portrayal of a twelve-year-old boy's interactions with a sex worker, as well as sex workers in general, has only gotten creepier over the years.
Melanie Griffith was far from the worst of it, but V is still not a role she might want to remember.