Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (ATAME!) [VHS]

Perhaps only Pedro Almodóvar could come up with a story about a mental patient who stalks and kidnaps an ex-porn star--and turn it into a tender love story. But that's exactly what happens in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, a lively installment from the Spanish director's wacky middle period (after the scruffy early films, and before his mature melodramas). Two of Almodóvar's sexiest stars, Antonio Banderas and Victoria Abril, play the leads: a cracked young man with dreams of bourgeois domesticity, and an actress who used to specialize in porno and heroin. Despite that fact that he binds her limbs with cord when he leaves the house, he always returns with a cheerful "I'm home!" For all Almodóvar's outrageousness, there's a touch of classical Hollywood in his construction. And while this movie is not for the politically correct, it does play by its own warped rules. --Robert Horton