Clearly buoyed by the success of his deliciously demented turn in William Lustig's cult 80s crime classic 'Relentless', Brat Pack bad boy Judd Nelson fearlessly appropriates flouncy Adam Ant garb, flaunts indelicate amounts of guyliner as hedonist club owner, slash trigger-happy psycho Charles 'Gideon' Morningside in Gary Davis's wonderfully bizarre, super soapy B-crime melodrama 'Conflict of Interest'. After cruelly witnessing the sudden drive-by shooting of his mother, distressed young son Jason (Zia Harris) is sent to his grandparents, and his hypertensive old man Mickey Flannery (Christopher McDonald) temporarily leaves the force to pursue his drinking and lava hot nurse Dey Young. Uncomfortably reunited after seven years absence, any chance of harmonious domesticity within the fractious Flannery household is fundamentally fubar'd by a series of brutal slayings that puts Mickey's majestically mulleted son Jason slam-bang in the frame as murder suspect number one!
About as subtle as an Yngwie Malmsteen solo, 'Conflict of Interest' is best enjoyed as a triumphantly trashy, crudely entertaining B-actioner, if one can digest the fromage laden script's awkward admixture of mawkish, movie-of-the-week flimflam and its salacious, surprisingly sleazy silicone-steeped shag-fests! One part Zalman King peep-show, and two parts Fred Olen Ray schlock, this licentious 90s actioner certainly has no lack of fleshly flavoursome ingredients! While Christopher McDonald's overly earnest mugging as blustering, Magnum-blasting cop/patriarch Mickey provides amble bad-movie grist, the more illicitly gratifying pleasures are in Conflict of Interest's more prurient episodes, not least of which being a lysergically laced boink in a boogie van, voyeuristic shots of Alyssa Milano's exquisitely perky behind, and plentiful 'Red Shoe Diaries' smut, but it is Judd Nelson's persistently boggle-eyed, hilariously gamy performance as the sartorially septic sadist 'Gideon' that elevates 'Conflict of Interest' from being just another absurdly entertaining misfire to that of a bona fide cult classic!
