Words by Jesse Serwer
Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” video is hall-of-fame level as far as topless model chick videos go. With its black-and-white scenes of Victoria’s Secret girl Helena Christensen frolicking half-naked on the beach, fashion photographer Herb Ritts’ video is indelibly burned into my brain, as I’m sure it also is for most boys my age lucky enough to have had cable in the early ’90s. That classic clip is a clear inspiration for Jamaican director Storm Saulter’s treatment of The Weeknd’s “Wicked Games,” one of several unofficial videos that have turned up recently for songs off of House of Balloons, the much-discussed debut project by secretive Toronto R&B singer Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a. The Weeknd.
Where the original “Wicked Game” went down on a Hawaiian beach, Saulter, the director of the Jamaican feature film Better Mus Come as well as Mavado’s upcoming “Delilah” video, took model Racquel Jones (and what appears to be his brother, Nile, as her faceless and mostly unseen male companion) to a seaside pool in Portland, Jamaica. Since there’s no need in this day to get this “Wicked Games” on MTV and VH1, and also because Tesfaye’s suggestive lyrics demand this sort of imagery, Storm takes the depravity level up about a hundred trillion notches, giving us unmitigated shots of Jones’s exposed breasts and well-manicured pubic region, underwater sex, orgasm-inspired facial contortions, and simulated coke-sniffing. Watch the thing below and—because we know you’re going to want to see more—we got Storm to send us over some exclusive still shots from the shoot. See them after the jump.
