It’s nearly Valentine’s Day – the most romantic day of the year – and what better way to celebrate than to watch some highly transgressive sex films? Screening at UK cinemas, on streaming sites, and via good old-fashioned home media this V-Day, the movies below are racy and often controversial works that, via their dubious subject matter and explicit material, have pushed the boundaries of creativity and good taste over the past half-century. (In many cases, it’s a wonder how they were even made in the first place.) But be them awards-baiting hits or obscure relics of underground filmmaking, they’re all united in their profound emphasis on debauchery. Read on to discover the tantalising films that could make or break your date night this Valentine’s Day.
This paean to California’s 70s Golden Age of Pornography was a real breakthrough for director Paul Thomas Anderson after it achieved critical and commercial success as well as three Academy Award nominations in 1997. And too right: Boogie Nights remains arguably the greatest mainstream movie ever to explore the lurid side of the film industry, telling the racy story of a young nightclub dishwasher (Mark Wahlberg) who becomes a dick-swinging mega-star while working for charismatic porn tycoon Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds).
Praised for its multi-layered screenplay, disco-fuelled jukebox soundtrack and delirious long takes (the film’s night club and pool parties scenes are intoxicating), Boogie Nights has also cemented itself as an all-timer due to its lighting-in-a-bottle ensemble cast. Among the highlights are Julianne Moore as a drug-addled porn veteran; William H. Macy as an insecure cameraman; Philip Seymour Hoffman as an overzealous crew hand; and Heather Graham as a rollerskating starlet. There are even a few cameos from real-life porn stars: Nina Hartley plays a promiscuous wife, while Veronica Hart – “the Meryl Streep of porn”, according to Anderson – takes on the role of a judge in a custody hearing.
When the Hong Kong motion picture rating system was introduced in 1988, the idea was to shield underage audiences from inappropriate content. Like the US’s ‘NC-17’ or the UK’s ‘18’ certificate, Hong Kong’s ‘Category III’ rating – the strictest in the territory – merely restricted anyone younger than 18 from viewing the movie. But as shrewd producers took advantage of the new label, it quickly became synonymous with extreme violence and sex – and, by the early 90s, ‘Cat III’ had become a brand for notoriety.
One of the most infamous ‘Cat III’ productions was a sensuous erotic comedy set in Ming Dynasty China. Sex and Zen – the story of a licentious but poorly-endowed scholar who, after discovering an ancient book of sex paintings, decides to undergo surgery to have a horse’s penis transplanted on him – became an unlikely box office hit in Hong Kong, and gained a cult audience overseas in the years thereafter.
A bountiful exercise in Chinese excess – expect padlocked vaginas, flute masturbation and ancient BDSM with silk red curtains and giant chain links – Sex and Zen is also genuinely funny, if only because of its sheer absurdity. A bizarre, raunchy relic, it receives a new deluxe home media release in the UK this month via 88 Films in a bid to claim a spot on your top shelf.
Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day – concerning a honeymooning doctor in Paris and a strange, cannibalistic woman – was responsible for a “full-blown scandal” at the 2001 Cannes film festival (“Even the French critics booed and walked out,” claimed a Guardian review from the time).
The real controversy likely stemmed from what the Barbican calls “one of the most electrifying screen ‘kisses’ ever”: an erotic and animalistic encounter between real-life sex symbol Béatrice Dalle and a young male stranger her character seduces at the film’s midway point. The intensity of this infamous moment is augmented by the film’s hypnotic atmosphere elsewhere: Trouble Every Day unfolds in a daze of minimalist dialogue and brooding guitar tones (courtesy of UK band Tindersticks), as Parisian hotel rooms and clinical science labs are haunted by the movie’s slow-moving cameras.
Lumped in dismissively with the ‘New French Extremity’ film movement (see Irreversible; Haute Tension; and, more recently, Julia Ducournau’s films Titane and Raw), this provocative work is deserving of reappraisal today – especially in light of Denis’ Cannes Grand Prix and Berlin Silver Bear wins in 2022 for Stars at Noon and Both Sides of the Blade.
One of the most under-appreciated cult films of legendary body horror icon David Cronenberg (The Fly) streams on MUBI this month as part of a collection titled You Up?: Midnight Movies, which invites viewers into a world of vice and excess via “erotically charged” modern greats. (Elsewhere on the program: explicit historical epic Caligula and Gaspar Noe’s unsimulated-sex-fest Love.)
Adapted from a novel by JG Ballard, and featuring an eerie, chiming score from Lord of the Rings composer Howard Shore, Crash is a hypnotic and erotic noir about a group of depraved auto fetishists who derive sexual gratification from car crashes. Rammed with homoerotic overtones and featuring several graphic collisions, the movie was met with outrage upon release in 1996, with the Evening Standard describing it as “a movie beyond the bounds of depravity”.
This all came after the film was greeted with walk-outs and a controversial Special Jury Prize win at the Cannes Film Festival, where jury president Francis Ford Coppola was reportedly vociferous in his dissent towards the film. In the years since, major filmmakers have come to defend its iconoclastic nature, with Martin Scorsese even naming it the eighth-best film of the 90s in 2000.
One exciting endeavour from Japanese cinema specialists Third Window Films over the past year relates to the uncovering of rare films from 80s indie filmmaking collective the Directors Company, which has resulted in several celebrated movies receiving their first-ever UK releases in 2024 and 2025.
Scent of a Spell is one of these. Directed by Toshiharu Ikeda, the movie follows casual philanderer Tetsuro (Johnny Okura), who encounters a suicidal woman (Mari Amachi) on a bridge during a gushing rainstorm. Bound by their mutual marriage struggles, the two begin a passionate sexual relationship, until a curious murder case in the newspaper causes Tetsuro to question whether Akiko has, in fact, been gaslighting him the whole time.
Vividly shot, and set to the smoothest of jazz piano soundtracks, Scent of a Spell is a low-key noir that’s also, basically, a softcore porno, with three highly-sophisticated “set pieces” confirming its skin flick credentials. That’s because the movie was a collab with Nikkatsu Studio’s ‘Roman Porno’ (aka “romantic pornography”) line — which, during a trying time for major film studios in Japan, sought to entice audiences via high-quality erotic movies promising a sense of narrative and artistic expression. This area of production served as a crucial stepping stone for budding filmmakers of the time — prestigious names like Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure) cut their craft in the sub-genre before graduating to Cannes and Venice prize-winning stardom in their later careers.
Further down the Roman Porno hole are UK distributors 88 Films, who are currently balls deep into a re-release run of Nikkatsu’s risqué softcore releases having launched a series of lascivious Blu-rays (marked by lurid pink obi strips) in December.
The series already includes such dubious classics as Woods Are Wet, a moody Gothic adaption of Marquis de Sade’s erotic novel ‘Justine’ – while Assault: Jack the Ripper!, a notorious 1976 porno-slasher about a waitress and a pastry chef who embark on a series of grisly, sex-infused serial killings (think Natural Born Killers but with added sex and cake spatulas), is forthcoming in March. One of the most fascinating artefacts uncovered for an unlikely contemporary release, though, is a 60-minute pseudo-documentary about hedonistic Swedes running wild in Stockholm discotheques and sex clubs – which is newly available for home viewing (probably not while your parents are around).
Sweden Porno: Blonde Animal was the result of an attempted cash-in on the ‘Swedish Sin’ stereotype of the 50s and 60s, which stemmed from widespread perceptions of the Scandinavian nation as being sexually liberal and lax on censorship. After deploying a lean crew of Japanese filmmakers to what was sometimes referred to as “the free sex kingdom of Sweden”, Nikkatsu returned with this cinema verité travelogue concerning blonde youths with bouffant hairdos who engage in partner-swapping in rooms full of sleek, minimalist furniture. An entire film cycle was supposedly planned but, despite an abundance of extreme close-ups of boobs, the gambit never really found an audience – and so Blonde Animal remains a curious oddity to this day.
