The controversial use of gratuitous nudity and sex have long been used to sell tickets for a film and sell copies for home release for On Demand, DVD and Blu-ray discs afterward. The use of eroticism in mainstream cinema became more frequent during the 1970s with art house films like Blue Movie from Andy Warhol and the more internationally recognized Last Tango in Paris starring Marlon Brando.

In many of these films, the erotic content was used to fuel a character driven drama, or even in some cases add to the overall narrative of the film. The themes have been successfully used in films such as Angel Heart, Leaving Las Vegas, Shame and more. However, there are times when the use of sex and nudity is used to disguise a thinly veiled plot, add pointless titillation, shock value or just as a way to simply exploit its stars.

The use of sex to sell a film hasn’t always been met with success, with some films suffering huge losses at the cinema, or getting mauled by critics and movie-goers alike. Then you get some films which are awful in every way yet people are still willing to pay the price of entry just for the raunchy subject matter. With that in mind, here are 15 garbage movies that show off a ton of skin.

15. Sorority Row

Sorority Row is a remake of the 1983 cult horror favorite The House on Sorority Row. The premise is a familiar one, a sorority prank goes very badly resulting in the death of one of the sisters meaning that all the guilty parties start to get picked off one by one. Not even a bizarre cameo appearance from the late Carrie Fisher can save this one.

As most below par post-Scream modern slasher films go, it’s a very by-the-numbers with predictable payoffs and death scenes kind of film. Perhaps more predictably, the female characters are used to simply exploit their sexuality, and the consistent overuse of gratuitous nudity takes precedence over the horror and the already thin plot.

14. Showgirls

After getting box office success with Basic Instinct, director Paul Verhoeven was expected to repeat that success once again with the 1995 film Showgirls. The marketing focused on the film’s nudity and sex prior to the film’s release and was expected to launch the former teen actress Elizabeth Berkley into super stardom in the same way that Basic Instinct did for Sharon Stone.

Prior to release, Showgirls was sold and intended as an intelligent and intellectual take on the adult industry, and about life as a stripper. The result was a badly acted misfire, that many critics felt was a smutty remake of the 1983 film Flashdance. Elizabeth Berkley was heavily criticized for her wooden performance, and other actors who were involved, such as Kyle Machlachlan, tried his best to distance himself from the film as much as possible. Since its release, Showgirls has taken on a new lease of life through its cult status as an unintentional satire, but whether one can consider that a triumph or not is purely down to the individual.

13. Zombie Strippers

When a film includes a horror icon like Robert Englund from the Nightmare on Elm Street series, then fans of the horror genre will usually expect something worthwhile, or at the very least he can add some class or substance to a movie that would otherwise be completely devoid of it. Unfortunately, not even Freddy Kruger himself can make the nightmare that is Zombie Strippers worth enduring for its 94 minutes running time.

It’s safe to say that a feature film with adult actress Jenna Jameson as its lead in the creatively titled Zombie Strippers was never intended to be an Oscar winning masterpiece that would be lacking in the nudity department. However, even intentionally silly/campy horror-based films can have fantastic execution when you consider the likes of Dusk Till Dawn. Zombie Strippers never rises above its low budget, awful dialogue, and it’s attempt at having an underlying satirical message.

12. Piranha 3DD

Schlock style horror films like the Piranha franchise have often relied on cheap scares and nudity. In spite of this, the original Piranha 3D was generally accepted as a self-aware tongue-in-cheek, and surprisingly witty homage to the horror genre. The film utilized the rising popularity of 3D in cinema to deliver its scares and a particularly silly underwater love-making scene between two of the female characters.

The positive critical and fan response to the film resulted in the imaginatively titled Piranha 3DD. Although the sequel retained its excessive use of gore and added in even more nudity, the film lost everything that made the original so appealing to fans in the first place, resulting in a shallow mess of a film that failed on all fronts.

11. Striptease

Striptease is a 1996 erotic comedy-drama starring Demi Moore who was at the peak of her fame during this time. Sporting an obvious wig having already shaved her head and gained a decent amount of muscle mass in training for her role in G.I Jane, Moore seemed to struggle to portray the down to earth sexiness needed for the role in Striptease.

Physically she certainly looked fit enough to play a dancer, and she even augmented her breasts for the part, but maybe she was still in ‘action hero mode’ preparing for her scenes as a Navy SEAL, as her performance here was widely criticized. It wasn’t just the performances that wasn’t up to par, the film was a complete failure on any dramatic level, and the humor completely missed the mark.

10. Cashback

“There’s beauty in all things” is the moral of the story in the 2008 British film Cashback. Yet all that morality goes out the window when its story focuses on an artist who has the ability to freeze time just so he can strip beautiful strangers (who just so happen to be real-life glamor models) naked and ‘appreciate’ them at his own convenience. The film tries to justify the main character’s creepy voyeuristic tendencies through the fact that he’s an artist, yet it falls flat on its face.

In addition, the characters are unconvincing cliches, and their only real purpose is to add some comedic value or a potential love interest in the form of a miscast Emilia Fox. There’s some brilliance here with camera trickery like in the scene that shows time-frozen snow, but it’s wasted on a film that feels devoid of any real substance beyond getting some pretty girls naked to satisfy one man’s amusement or needs.

9. 9½ Weeks

9½ Weeks is an erotic drama released in 1986 starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke as an art gallery employee and a mysterious Wall Street Broker who embark on an intense affair. Two years after the completion of the film, 9½ Weeks was released in its cut form because it was deemed too sexually explicit for a U.S release. The film was considered a box office failure upon release and was received poorly by critics at the time.

The film’s narrative focuses on the escalating sexual relationship between Rourke and Basinger’s characters, but the entirety of the plot is at times completely ludicrous. Every scene develops solely for the purpose of setting up one improbable sexual encounter to the next. The films only saving grace is the performances from the actors, but even they can’t save the nonsensical plot and dire script.

8. Basic Instinct 2

The original Basic Instinct released in 1992 is usually credited for being the film that made Sharon Stone into a household name. The film itself wasn’t quite deserving of the hype, and most of the marketing tended to focus on a certain scene where Sharon Stone simply crossed and opened her legs. The film did have a lot of cinematic flair in an attempt at being a modern day erotic Hitchcockian thriller.

The sequel Basic Instinct 2 once again featured Sharon Stone reprising her role of the suspected serial killer Catherine Tramwell, but the film as a whole fell flat. The plot, characters, and awful dialogue were even criticized by the director of the original film, Paul Verhoeven. In addition, Rotten Tomatoes has the film ranked No. 89 in the 100 worst reviewed films of the 2000s.

7. Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty is a 2011 erotic Australian drama directed by Julia Leigh and starring Emily Browning in the lead role. Browning’s character is a young university student that takes up a highly paid part-time job that requires her to voluntarily enter physical unconsciousness in order to submit to the erotic desires of rich paying men.

It’s quite odd that this film is considered to be at all erotic. Rather it’s a creepy, disturbing and slightly black-comic look at how rich elderly gentlemen might behave when they have money, power, wealth, and status but no longer have youth. However, Sleeping Beauty’s execution is dull, there’s a complete lack of a plot and the ending is totally unsatisfying despite some solid acting from the leading cast.

6. WHAT?

WHAT? is a little known improvised Italian sex comedy by the renowned director Roman Polanski that was released in 1973. The inspiration for the film came from a Playboy magazine comic strip known as Little Annie Fanny and centers on a girl played by Sydne Rome who takes refuge in an Italian villa when she escapes three would-be rapists.

WHAT? plays out like an even more surreal X-rated Alice In Wonderland/Goldilocks tale featuring an odd assortment of strange and colorful characters that inhabit the villa, but any hopes to make a modicum of sense out of the silly plot and somewhat chauvinistic treatment of its lead star will result in frustration. If you want to watch Polanski at his best then stick with Chinatown.

5. Color of Night

Back in the 1990s, Bruce Willis starred in a string of box office hits like Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys, The Fifth Element, Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. However, not every film decision he made was a good one, and perhaps the erotic thriller Color of Night was his biggest flop yet. Despite being one of the most rented films in 1995 (presumably to see Willis going full-frontal) it won a Golden Raspberry Award for being the worst film in its release year.

Color of Night was intended to be an erotic mystery thriller, but unfortunately, the identity of the murderer was a long way from being a mystery and the story was a lot of things but thrilling isn’t one of them. At least Maxim magazine heaped a lot of praise on its sex scenes though.

4. Caligula

The 1979 film Caligula starring acting legends such as Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, and Helen Mirren. The Penthouse magazine production was originally intended to be an explicit adult film with a feature film narrative and production values. The film in its uncut form still remains banned in several countries including Australia, Canada, and Iceland.

Caligula features real sex scenes where producer and Penthouse magazine founder Bob Guccione cast ‘Penthouse Pets’ as background extras to perform in unsimulated sex scenes, which he filmed himself during post-production. The added scenes angered Caligula’s director Tinto Brass causing him to disavow the film altogether. The truth is, Brass likely knew what an absolute abomination of a film Caligula turned out to be, and despite its cult status it’s considered by many critics to be one of the worst films ever made.

3. 9 Songs

9 Songs is a British art-romance film that was directed by Michael Winterbottom and was considered the most sexually explicit film to ever receive a certificate for general release in the UK due to its performances of unsimulated sex. It charts the relationship between two lovers over the course of a year, through the couple’s sexual intimacy and love for rock concerts. In addition to the real sex scenes, the film featured oral sex, a foot job, as well as a scene of ejaculation.

It’s possible that Michael Winterbottom’s intention for 9 Songs sex scenes was to be metaphoric for its overarching narrative, yet somehow this art-house experiment and all of its explicit scenes are pretentious and dull in almost every way.

2. Killing Me Softly

Killing Me Softly which was released in 2002 is an erotic American-British production and the first English-language film from the well-respected and award-winning Chinese director Chen Kaige. The film boasted great looking leads and excellent actors with Heather Graham in the role of a woman bored with life. Playing the male lead, Joseph Fiennes starred as a mysterious mountain man with a potentially dark past. The film’s narrative focuses on what began as a sexually charged romance that eventually leads to a marriage of distrust and suspicion when Graham’s character discovers that her husband’s previous fiancée died under mysterious circumstances.

On the surface it seemed like a film with all the right ingredients for an erotic mystery thriller, unfortunately for all involved with Killing Me Softly, it was a recipe for disaster. The film was rife with ridiculous plot twists, amateurish dialogue, and a hideously convoluted narrative that Rotten Tomatoes considered one of the worst films in a decade.

1. The Fifty Shades Franchise

The Fifty Shades film franchise is based on the books of the same name and was developed from a Twilight fan fiction series written by E.L James. Despite the books being considered poorly written, predictable, and derivative, the series sold over 125 million copies worldwide sparking the inevitable film adaptations that began in 2011.

Living up to the quality of the books most critics considered the films to be terrible, citing that the actors lacked any on-screen chemistry. Jamie Dornan who despite giving stellar performances in the past is totally one note, dull and monotone throughout both films. Additionally, the first entry “won” more Golden Raspberry Awards in 2011 than any other film. The films were still a huge box office hit despite the glaring lack of quality, with a third film due to be released in 2018. In an era where studios could care less about the quality of a film as long as it makes money, Fifty Shades is definitely up there with the likes of Transformers, only the acting is far more robotic than all of the Autobots and Decepticons put together.

Sources: IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes