Cast your mind back to the late 90's. The place is suburban Melbourne, Australia, and Foxtel has just begun to make the rounds as the first widely available pay-tv network in Australia. With Foxtel came a slew of movies and shows I'd neither seen nor heard of before, and one of them was The Hunger.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118346/?ref_=ttmc_mc_ttThe Hunger was a 44 episode horror anthology series with an adult/erotic undercurrent. Just about every episode has some kind of sex and nudity. The horror aspects were generally quite tame, more of a supernatural or thriller aspect than blood and guts, and the stories often had a twist at the end. Imagine The Twilight Zone but with sex and nudity, and that is pretty much The Hunger.
The series may have had a connection with the 1983 vampire movie The Hunger with David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve, as both were produced by Tony Scott. The Hunger (1983) was beautifully shot, even by today's standards, but this unfortunately did not carry over to the TV series. However, it is still very watchable.
Warning: NSFW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVSc-VUm0lsThe reasons this series even more interesting than earlier erotic thriller anthology series like The Hitch Hiker are numerous:
1. Terence Stamp was the host, topping and tailing each 30 minute story with a vignette of his own. Later episodes featured David Bowie.
2. Ridley Scott and Tony Scott were the main producers of this series.
3. The series featured a lot of actors who later became, or were at the time, very popular. In the first several episodes, you see Balthazar Getty, Lena Headey, Daniel Craig and Jason Scott Lee. It's quite remarkable to see Daniel Craig play a handyman in an apartment building inhabited by a wheelchair-bound matriarch.
4. The episodes were usually based on short stories by prominent horror and thriller writers.
- Brian Lumley - Necroscope series
Graham Masterton- prolific extreme horror and thriller writer
F. Paul Wilson - Repairman Jack series
David Morell - the original Rambo story
Harlan Ellison
Christa Faust (the best damn name for a female horror author ever)
Tanith Lee
David Schow
Kim Newman
and many more. A lot of the stories are in a series of books called Hot Blood, which I very much recommend to readers of such literature. I recognized a number of the stories, and it was fascinating and exciting to see how they had been dramatized.
Filmed in Montreal, the series had many American, British and Canadian actors. Generally, things were done very well. The series has that mid 90's TV feel and still bears watching, even now. Does anyone else like this series? I recommend it to anyone who likes horror and erotic fiction, or Twilight Zone type anthology shows.