With talk of late proclaiming that upcoming, much hyped on screen couple Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson have the worst ever chemistry on display in “Fifty Shades of Grey”, I’ve been thinking about the least sexy, cinematic sex scenes ever made. The pair was apparently doing reshoots up until a few weeks ago, and by all accounts their press tour has been like watching a soon-to-be-divorced couple in the early stages of therapy!
With talk of late proclaiming that upcoming, much hyped on screen couple Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson have the worst ever chemistry on display in “Fifty Shades of Grey”, I’ve been thinking about the least sexy, cinematic sex scenes ever made. The pair was apparently doing reshoots up until a few weeks ago, and by all accounts their press tour has been like watching a soon-to-be-divorced couple in the early stages of therapy!
The only way to really ascertain how bad – or good – the two are when they (literally) come together on screen is by actually seeing the movie for yourself, and I’ve seen more than my fair share where the lack of romance between the leads is excruciating. Sex can liven up a movie when things get boring, it can make a movie laugh-out-loud silly (like the wet antics in “Showgirls”), and it can occasionally add to the plot. Like in real life it can be really, really titillating and scorchingly hot. However, also like in real life, when the rhythm is off it can be awkward, creepy, or unintentionally hysterical.
So, here’s my best of the worst, and feel free to add to the list…
Showgirls
One of the campest and most fun-to-quote movies of all time, “Showgirls” is one of my favourite things to watch with a very old friend, often accompanied by buckets of champagne and/or dirty martinis. We know every scene by heart, and when Elizabeth Berkley flails and flops around the pool while making love to Kyle MacLachlan there is plenty to giggle about. It’s been called “part exorcism and part lovemaking” and takes place in the Las Vegas porno version of a Disney World swimming pool with the most insane fake waterfall. Sadly – or perhaps amusingly for my friend and I - a lot of what “Showgirls” director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas thought was "hot" was, in fact, absolutely ludicrous. By the end of the whole shebang you don't know whether Berkley has reached orgasm or is mid-seizure of some kind, and poor old Kyle MacLachlan just looks bewildered.
Gigli
At the time of its release, it was open season on the truly horrific "Gigli". It was an unequivocal disaster of a film that came close to ending the careers of its two leads, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez (then still a real life couple, amazingly) and did end the career of its writer-director, Martin Brest, who hasn't worked since. There are many reasons for that (I could go on for HOURS), but one of the most prominent is the truly atrocious sex scene that features the moment when apparent lesbian Lopez is "turned" by Affleck's barely discernible charms. Can I add that this happens just a few moments after his girlfriend has topped herself, when the pair return to his apartment and get to it? But I digress. After some sloppy kissing of sorts, La Lopez leans back on the bed, indicates towards her crotch and says one of the worst lines in the history of cinema: “It’s turkey time… gobble gobble!” It has to be seen, to be believed.
Eyes Wide Shut
It has long been believed that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman‘s marriage was on the rocks when they played a troubled couple in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 sexual drama “Eyes Wide Shut,” but in an essay for The Hollywood Reporter, Kidman said that it wasn’t so. “People thought that making the film was the beginning of the end of my marriage, but I don’t really think it was,” Kidman wrote. “Tom and I were close then, and it was very much the three of us. Onscreen, the husband and wife are at odds, and Stanley wanted to use our marriage as a supposed reality. That was Stanley: He used the movie as provocation, pretending it was our sex life — which we weren’t oblivious to, but obviously it wasn’t us. We both decided to dedicate ourselves to a great filmmaker and artist,” she said. She also dedicated herself to a movie-length look at the sheer creepiness of her ex-husband all round, and I am yet to see a flick where Cruise doesn’t exude that vibe. As an aside, I read that Kubrick always intended to cast an actual married couple as the movie’s leads, but Cruise and Kidman weren’t the pair he had in mind. The initial couple he thought of was Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.
Acid House
This film was scripted by one of my favourite authors, Irvine (“Trainspotting”) Welsh from his book of the same name. It is a trilogy of truly horrible – and at times very amusing - tales set in Scotland involving drugs, sex and lowlifes. The part I am going to focus on is the chapter when, over the space of a day, a young lad called Boab gets kicked out of his home by his parents, dumped by his girl, let go by his team and then beaten by the police. At the end of his tether (to put it mildly) he walks into a pub where he meets God. Clearly also having an off day, God turns Boab into a fly due to the fact that he has wasted his life. As a fly, the boy returns to his parents’ home, where he walks into one hell of a scene. His mother is taking his dad from behind with a strap on whilst whispering all manner of profanities – a situation where being a ‘fly on the wall” would never be an option. It actually gets worse at one point, but I’ll leave it at that!
Avatar
I have to confess that I did not actually see this film, but heard so much about the absolutely hilarious sex scenes in it at the time that I happily googled the hell out of them. According to James Cameron, it appears that intertwining your “hair-tail” is better than kissing and/or canoodling. And they weren’t technically sex scenes but “ultimate intimacy” scenes that are only available as DVD extras. Also, the statement "we are mated...for liiiiiife?" is most definitely not hot. I think Complex magazine put it best when they said, “OK, James Cameron. We get it. You're a talented filmmaker who basically reinvented the way that movies are made with “Avatar”. But did you really need to reinvent the act of sex, too? And why is it like plugging in a Ninento GameCube?”