Mens Health

 

Why bother with get-you-fired-from-work downloads and in-out-in-out porn movies? The mainstream film industry has plenty of smut masquerading as "movies"... You just have to know where to find them.

9½ Weeks

Starring Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger. Directed by Adrian Lyne (1985)

Some old-skool, mid-Eighties steam, courtesy of Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke and a refrigerator. There isn’t much of a plot going on here: instead, the producers used “character development” to fill the gaps between the raunchy bits. This was, you’ll recall, a time when actual porn was pretty tricky to get hold of (you had to actually go into a shop and buy dirty pictures, as opposed to just opening a new Internet browser window) – and it laid the sheets for the likes of Basic Instinct and its parade of saucy knock-offs (Body of Evidence, Color of Night).

Basic Instinct

Starring Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, Jeanne Tripplehorn. Directed by Paul Verhoeven (1992)

You may remember lying about your age at the video shop when this one came out back in the early Nineties. The plot (because that's why you're here, right?) revolves around a mystery novelist (Stone) who plays mind games with a detective (Douglas). It’s holds its own as a psychological thriller, which is why you'll get away with watching it. But there is plenty of skin on screen here – and you might recall it getting a 2-21 age restriction under the old video shop system.

Basic Instinct 2

Starring Sharon Stone, Hugh Dancy, David Thewlis, David Morrissey. Directed by Michael Caton-Jones (2006)

It's Basic Instinct, except with British accents.

Henry & June

Starring Uma Thurman, Fred Ward, Maria de Medeiros. Directed by Philip Kaufman (1990)

Long is the list of “art” films which are really just tastefully-lit skin flicks (Betty Blue, Y Tu Maman Tambien, L’Ennui, we could really keep going with this all night...). But Henry And June is one of the best. It is – according to what we’re copy/pasting here off Wikipedia – the tale of French writer Anaïs Nin, who finds herself attracted to the “liberating, bohemian lifestyle” of American writer Henry Miller and his foxy wife June.

Cue much shagging – including a particularly easy-to-watch lesbian scene between Maria de Madeiros and her future Pulp Fiction costar Uma Thurman. There is basically no storyline here... But the literary themes, the tenuous historical angle and the 1930s costumes make it an erotic drama that you can watch with your girlfriend, as opposed to a racy porno that will make your girlfriend think you’re a creep.

Last Tango In Paris

Starring Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci (1972)

Here’s another one the “art film” crowd have been hiding from us: Italian auteur Bernardo Bertolucci directs American thespian Marlon Brando in the story of a widower who discovers his primal sexuality through an anonymous affair with a young French woman. It’s creepy, icky, violent (you will never eat butter on your bread again) and disgracefully misogynistic. But it’s also – for reasons known only to hairy-palmed film students – a classic.