Bad sex scenes can be anything from corny to cringeworthy, and some of them really stick. But bad scenes don’t always ruin whole movies. So when it comes to these, just get up, make some popcorn, and come back to the couch in a few minutes. It’ll be over soon.
Worst
Demolition Man
At one point in this dumb-as-rocks 1993 science fiction film, Sandra Bullock and Sylvester Stallone sit down on separate couches, pull silver helmets onto their heads, and log into virtual reality for some simulated shtupping. Immersive cybersex sounds fun, yes, but it’s Game Over pretty quick.
Stallone plays LAPD sergeant John Spartan, who is cryogenically frozen, then reanimated to fight crime in the year 2032. He is assigned to Lieutenant Lenina Huxley (Brave New World, anyone?), who invites him to her pad and hits him with this sultry line:
“There is, of course, a well-known and documented connection between sex and violence. Not so much a causal effect, but a general state of neurological arousal. And after having observed your behavior this evening, and my resultant condition, I was wondering if you would like to have sex.”
Once a confused Spartan consents, Huxley lowers the lights, puts on the Love Boat theme music (yes, really), and whips out the helmets. In 2032, fluid transfer is illegal (this movie came out during the AIDS crisis) so sex has gone straight-to-video. For the next thirty seconds of Demolition Man, this means porny shots of Bullock’s sighing face intercut with crash zooms of Stallone breathing heavily.
Weirded out, he rips off his headset and proposes doing it the old-fashioned way, which he refers to as, “you know, boning, the wild mambo, the hunka-chunka.” She says no. He tries to kiss her anyway. She asks him to leave, and he saunters away through a futuristic door that goes whoosh.
It’s not just a bad sex scene: it’s a bad scene that tries to say something interesting about how our desire for perfection turns good sex into bad sex. Maybe next time. Stallone hits the Eject button, and so do we. — Hunter Styles
The Matrix Reloaded
It starts with a clumsy boner reference and gets worse from there: “I missed you.” “I can tell.” Wink. Wink. Get it?
The heroes/lovers Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) decide to ditch the underground candle-lit rave attended by 50,000 sweaty people dressed in tight brown, beige, and gray clothes as drab as the droning house music and head to a big brick pizza oven to get biz-zay. After watching randos dance and jump up and down for a while, the movie flashes over to Neo and Trinity, naked in the missionary position (so, no foreplay, then?). For three-and-a-half minutes the viewer is treated to moments of the lovers casually making out, looking concerned, and lightly thrusting — though, other than that first shot of Neo on top of Trin, we never see below the collarbone again — interspersed with the rave. Trinity fakes an O, and it’s over. — Kristin Palpini
The Man Who Fell to Earth
We all love David Bowie — it’s not his fault the sex in this movie took a weird turn. In the film, Bowie plays an alien, making his character’s love-making all the more out of this world. American Graffiti star Candy Clark plays his lover. During the big sex scene of the movie, the pair takes turns wielding a gun and shooting each other. Clark, who plays Mary-Lou, pitches her already squeaky voice into a maniacal squeal, which she maintains throughout the scene. Mixed with the sound of gunshots, that cacophony is the most irksome part of it all. — Amanda Drane
And a couple of the best…
Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear
This is one of the best sex scenes ever because the zany filmmaking trio Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker embrace how intrinsically ridiculous the Hollywood sex scene can be. Detective Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) and Jane Spencer (Priscilla Presley) rekindle their romance by getting all steamy with a spoof of the pottery sex scene in Ghost. Hands, feet, and clay are everywhere. After a little more clay-play, ZAZ hits the audience with one sexual innuendo after another: flowers, oil rigs, torpedoes, a hot dog, and a slam dunk for good measure. — KP
Blue Is The Warmest Color
This indie French film, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche and starring Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, is a romantic coming-of-age saga about a high school teen who steps tentatively into a lesbian bar and falls into a relationship with an older art student. It’s a tremendous film, saturated with erotic longing and young heartbreak. It won a ton of awards when it premiered in 2013, even though it’s three hours long and very, very French. Blue is the Warmest Color is powered by intelligent and sensual acting — the magnetic Seydoux, especially, could make a slab of rock break a sweat — but when the tone shifts from ennui to on-me, things really heat up.
The miracle here is how director Kechiche steers the lesbian sex scenes away from the voyeuristic. It’s honest, and full of character. We come to understand their troubled attraction as much through wordless touch as through clothed conversations. The stakes are high, and the breathless excitement of young love feels urgent and genuine, not staged. — HS
