The Top 100 Cult Movie Nude Scenes of All Time: #20-11

Celebrating the bare and the beautiful from movies weird, wondrous, and beloved by wackadoos.

Numbers 20 to 11.

Top twenty time. And the tits just keep on coming.

Jump in for vampire lesbianism in The Hunger, Linda Blair-Sybil Danning prison shower lesbianism in Chained Heat, Laura Gemser lesbianism, Dyanne Thorne as Ilsa, Pam Grier’s mammoth chocolate milk-sacks, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s fluffy muff and bruised butt, Chesty Morgan udderly smothering Harry Reems, Nastassja Kinski’s furry pet Cat People pussy, Jill Schoelen showering in The Stepfather, and Princess of All Wonder Nipples Gisele Lindley in McBeardo’s Favorite Movie of All Time!

The clothes come off as the cuntdown continues….

NUMBER 20
Catherine Deneuve/Susan Sarandon
THE HUNGER (1983)
(1:03)
Sweet Sue spills red wine on her white shirt. Vampire Catherine is there to lend a hand - and gland - as they fall into bed and succumb to undead Sapphic passions.

• Although Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon are two of the most naked actresses the world will ever know, The Hunger remains each one’s only incidence of lesbianism on film.

Catherine has appeared naked in 10 movies, most notably Belle de Jour (1967) and La Sauvage (1975), while super-sacked Sue has peeled in 16 titles, including the cult milestones Joe (1970), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Pretty Baby (1978), and Atlantic City (1981).

• Prior to The Hunger, goth girls existed as only as they are depicted in the movie’s opening scene - skulking around big-city drugatorium dance-parlors, grooving to groovelessness like “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by Bauhaus, just like bare-boobed Ann Magnuson does here.

After The Hunger, “death betties” emerged and multiplied, ultimately resulting in Winona Ryder’s high-school ghoul in Beetlejuice (1988) inspirationally blowing the lids off countless glamour coffins for generations to come.

Still, for the life (and undeath) of me, I’ve never understood how Bauhaus and all related limp-wick music identified as “goth” (Banshees, The Cure, Clan of - puke! - Xymox) ever got associated with vampires, bats, spiders, haunted houses, and/or horror in general.

The music does not in any way sound the way that stuff looks and feels - at least not to me. And I know everything there is to know about all that shit. Everything.

Offical Goth music just came off like fruity wastes-of-cocks-and-balls in from the suburbs to “club.” And it still does.

In fact, the first record I ever heard that seemed to sonically approximate a goth-girl aesthetic was Fontanelle by Babes in Toyland. That was in 1992, and it was followed in short order by PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me and, later, Plague Mass by Diamanda Galas.

Those albums sound(ed) spooky, haunted, scary, homi/suicidal, possessed by she-demons, and monstrous in an authentically female way - you know, goth-girly.

But goth girls never for that stuff. Or, by extension, me.

Oh well, I’m happy they’re a whole porn fetish unto themselves now.

• Much pre-release ado was made of Susan and Catherine’s girl-girl love scene. It really was Hollywood’s very first on-camera lady-homo contact between A-list stars.

Buzz built big, as well, regarding co-star David Bowie’s 2,000-year-old thin-white-duke make-up.

But then MGM slipped The Hunger into theaters virtually unheralded, with a cheesy poster that looks like the antithesis of all its Euro-chic airs.

As a general release, the movie came and went in a blink, but midnight screenings kept it alive and a specific audience took it to heart, resulting in multiple video editions, t-shirts, and other collector’s junk.

Goth girls. Them again.

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NUMBER 19
Maggie Gyllenhaal
SECRETARY (2002)
(1:41)
After an entire movie’s worth of bondage, spankings, and all manner of sexual domination, sadist James Spader lovingly bathes full-frontal masochist Maggie,

• Maggie’s lean, lanky, uniquely artful physique is so sexy that, during the climactic bathtub moment, you won’t even notice the christawful sub-Lilith-Faire love theme blaring on the soundtrack.

Except now you will, since it’s been pointed out to you. Forever.

And so you can never forget possibly forget, take note: that song is “Chariots Rise” by Lizzy West.

Click the link. See how much of it you can make it through without Maggie’s auburn muff there to mesmerize you into sweet, merciful deafness.

• Anyone attempting to compose any analysis of worth regarding any aspect of cult movies is merely a pretender to the throne that will be forever occupied by Danny Peary.

Nobody more humbly fits that description than I do.

In 1982, Peary authored the life-changing Cult Movies: The Classics, The Sleepers, The Weird & The Wonderful, which was followed by Cult Movies 2 in 1984 and Cult Movies 3 in 1989.

All are beyond essential, as are Peary’s Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986), Cult Movie Stars (1991), and Alternate Oscars (1994).

Peary graced MrSkin.com with a Skinterview in 2005, in which he was asked: “Are there any modern actresses who’d be worthy of making it into your Cult Movie Stars book?”

His response: “Maggie Gyllenhaal is a perfect candidate. She’s very smart and very political and gets herself in trouble. Many of her roles are sexual in nature. She discusses her roles like I would. There was one interview–probably for Secretary where she was discussing sex as communication, which is what I wrote about when I reviewed Last Tango in Paris. Cult-movie stars require some kind of quality that entrances you. I’m kind of fascinated by that aspect. Why do people respond like that, where they have to see every movie an actress was in? Why did I like Maureen O’Sullivan in those Tarzan movies? I know it wasn’t just me.”

• The Maggie quote to which Peary refers is: “I think Secretary’s funny. It is about sex, and there’s a lot of sex in it, sex is the key, but you’re talking about a lot of other complicated things. I think sex is very interesting for most people, but I’m interested in sex as a way of communication, I’m not that interested in the fantasy version of a sex scene.

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NUMBER 18
Chesty Morgan
DEADLY WEAPONS (1973)
(1:08)
Chesty suffocates Harry Reems with her superhumanly humongous bosom to a musical score that sounds curiously like Japanese doom metal. What a way(s) to go.

• When Deadly Weapons exploded in theaters, five-foot-five Lillian Wilczkowsky - aka Chesty Morgan - is alleged to have measured 73PP-32-36, the first figure of which is believable enough.

She was also reported to have weighed a scant 118 pounds, according to a newspaper ad for her appearance at the Knight Lounge in Warren Pennsylvania.

Think about what an actual 118-pound woman looks like - why, she’d be just about the exact same size of one of Chesty Morgan’s legendarily leviathan-proportioned organs!

With perfect credibility, however, the Knight Lounge further proclaimed: “”The world’s chestiest, exotic, she defies medical science. Fabulous!! Incredible!! Amazing! Fantastic!! What your eyes see, you must believe. Stageland’s biggest Attraction.”

• Chesty’s double feature (in every sense) for grindhouse maven Doris Wishman - Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73 (1974) - came about as a result of its star’s rack-tackular touring career as an exotic dancer.

“My boobs belong to the world,” Chesty declared. “They’re attached to my body, but they belong to the public.”

• Mo(i)st notably, Chesty’s act involved inviting everyone in the audience to come rub their mitts all over her milk-bazookas, in order to verify that they were real.

This hands-on/glands-on policy landed Chesty in court several times, where lawyers argued that her openness to being groped constituted free speech, while the dairy queen in question saw it more as a gigantic-gazonga’d act of generosity, noting: “My heart is as big as my chest!”

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NUMBER 17
Nastassja Kinski
CAT PEOPLE (1982)
(1:04)
Under a full moon, fur-frontal Nastassja darts around nude in the woods, in hot pursuit of a wascally wabbit. What a pelt!

• Nastassja’s first major exposure (in every sense) occurred opposite Christoper Lee and Richard Widmark in the late-era Hammer Films favorite, To the Devil … a Daughter (1976).

The reason that movie is a favorite, very specifically, is because of Nastassja’s full-frontal nudity.

She was 17.

One can only ponder what might have been had the role gone to whom it was originally intended: Olivia Newton-John!

• Tellingly, Nastassja is the daughter of larger-than-loss-of-life movie madman Klaus Kinski, star of numerous way-out films including many by German visionary Werner Herzog, and author of Kinksi: Uncut, the goddamndest autobiography you ever will read, I promise you.

Klaus claims in the book to have lost his virginity to his sister and then, later, had sex with his mother.

The feelings Klaus expresses toward Nastassja run along that same vein, and it was alleged that he “begged” her to play his on-camera lover in a movie.

• So perhaps coincidentally - or perhaps, in a big way, not - many of Nastassja’s best-known films deal directly with incest.

Her character in Cat People mates with her own brother.

In To the Devil … A Daughter, she proudly struts about nude in front of her father(s) - both the one of this realm, and the one to the south.

Nastassja accidentally sleeps with her biological father in Stay As You Are (1978), experiences pseudo-cousin rape in Tess (1979), and there’s incest in Paris, Texas (1984), too.

Then in Little Boy Blue (1998), Nastassja, at last, gets to be the parent bringing the taboo to the table - specifically, by riding the rod of Ryan Phillipe as her son, at the insistence of her husband John Savage, who’s also the kid’s dad.

Tit runs in the family.

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NUMBER 16
Jill Schoelen
THE STEPFATHER (1987)
(1:13)
Jill undresses for a shower, aims her bare ass at the camera as she steps into the spray, soaps up her nude boobs all nice-like, rinses off, steps back out.

• This is it: the single most gratuitous nude scene in the history of the movies.

At one-hour, 13-minutes, the plot of the film we have been watching titled The Stepfather stops. Jill strips nude, we watch her shower, she gets out, puts clothes back on, and then the plot of the movie The Stepfather starts again.

I have witnessed more shower scenes than there are actual showers in this world. I have watched nudity for the sake of nudity from the moment I could watch anything.

And this is as gratuitous as it gets.

• Let us even look over the official Webster’s Dictionary definition of “gratuitous”: “Being without apparent reason, cause, or justification.” And here are the listed synonyms: “unnecessary, superfluous, redundant; causeless, unreasonable, groundless, unprovoked, unjustified.”

I assure you, Jill Schoelen’s shower in The Stepfather is the most gratuitous nude scene of all time.

Which makes it a masterpiece. Of ass. And otherwise.

• After playing a hard-to-get-naked object of desire in the lovable teen sex comedy Hot Moves (1984), Jill fast-tracked herself to Scream Queen status with The Stepfather, Curse II: The Bite (1989), Cutting Class (1989), Phantom of the Opera (1989), Popcorn (1991), and When a Stranger Calls Back (1993).

Aside from a brief engagement to her Cutting Class co-star Brad Pitt, Jill rather quickly removed herself from the spotlight and has acted only sporadically since then.

We all miss you, Jill. And yours.

• The Stepfather rolled out city by city in 1987, garnering surprisingly good reviews, including an influential rave from Richard Schickel in Time magazine.

Me? I’ve never cared for The Stepfather.

It all adds up to too much “sockin’ it to the squares” silliness and cartoonish overkill, especially given what should be the extraordinary sum of its parts: Jill Schoelen as described above, Terry O’Quinn firing on every conceivable cylinder, a script by Donald E. Westlake, and ace exploitation veteran Joseph Ruben (The Pom Pom Girls) at the helm. Plus it’s got hilarious sight of Stepfather whacking Shelley Hack in the beak with the kitchen phone.

But I just don’t like it. Certainly The Stepfather beats the snot out of American Beauty and Revolutionary Road and such nonsense (again, with the kitchen phone), but … eh.

Sorry I’m not from the suburbs, I guess.

Alas, two sequels and a remake later, I remain in the minority on The Stepfather.

Schoelen may have faded, but Westlake is a legend, O’Quinn became one of our most compelling actors, and Ruben immediately afterward got to make big-budget blockbusters.

Shows you what I know. But trust me on the gratuitous nudity.

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NUMBER 15
Giselle Lindley
FORBIDDEN ZONE (1980)
(0:38)
As the Princess of the Sixth Dimension, proto-Paris-Hilton Giselle is topless every moment she’s on screen, thrusting forth the two most pert mini-mammaries with the most perfectly devourable nerps ever photographed. In the interest of skinsistency, let’s single out the scene where Princess readies Frenchy (Marie Pascale-Elfman) for deep-tissue vaginal shock treatment.

• Forbidden Zone is my favorite movie of all time.

As intrigued as I was by its brief midnight run at the Waverly in 1982 (replacing, I think, Basket Case) I didn’t catch up with Forbidden Zone for another five years, when I was 19, and I casually rented the video.

There, then, was everything I ever saw when I closed my eyes - weird sex, weirder violence, obscenity, absurdity, rock-opera show tunes, Depression-era cartoon soundtracks, Borscht Belt yuks, comical racism, off-the-wall animation, Old Hollywood, New Wave, hidden respites from day-to-day dreariness where naked slave girls line the walls, where gorillas roam free, and where a six-foot frog could wear a tux and serve as your butler.

And all of it erupting in glorious black-and-white

• Those are just Forbidden Zone’s generalities, to boot.

Consider the specifics: Susan Tyrell as mad Queen Doris, her real-live lover Herve Villechaize as King Fausto, a Three Stooges song (with new dirty lyrics!), power-boozing Joe Spinell, Danny Elfman as a finger-shakin’ Satan, and lean, long-limbed, snobby-titted Gisele Lindley running around in a princess tiara, granny panties, high heels and nothing else - sporting a very particular pair of gorgeously engorged nipples that I swore could never possibly exist outside of detailed sketches in the margins of my notebooks from grades one through 13.

• Upon seeing Forbidden Zone, all I could wonder was: How could this have not been instantly recognized as the greatest art work to date brought forth by the motion picture medium?

Why wasn’t John Waters promoting Forbidden Zone on Letterman? How come it wasn’t outselling Rocky Horror every weekend? What went wrong with Danny Peary and the people I depended for them to have not alerted me to the reality of such absolute perfection?

None of that happened because it’s a shit-wad world. That’s all, and that’s why.

And that’s also why, ultimately, I’m glad Forbidden Zone remained below the Cult Industry’s radar all those years, even though I was ecstatic when a new print was struck that made the midnight movie rounds in 2004 and, after years of being legally available, Cult Epics put out a Special Edition DVD packed with everything for which an FZ fanatic could have hoped.

The Sixth Dimension, it turns out, is only for those of us who really want to be there.

• On the commentary track of the aforementioned DVD, Matthew Bright - who co-scripted FZ and stars as Squeezit and Rene Henderson - sees Gisele strut on-screen for the first time, and yells: “I wanted to fuck her SO BAD! I wish I had fucked her! Why didn’t I fuck her!? Oh, GOD, I wanted to fuck her!”

You will understand this man’s agony.

• For all of Danny Elfman’s success first with the rock group Oingo Boingo and subsequently as one of Hollywood’s most esteemed composers, the other creative forces behind Forbidden Zone did not fare so well.

Co-writer and director Richard Elfman (Danny’s brother) didn’t direct another movie until the pretty shitty Shrunken Heads (1994) and his only feature since then has been the pretty great and - unsurprisingly - overlooked Modern Vampires (1999).

He has long voiced a desire to make a proper Forbidden Zone follow-up, which the IMDB indicates he is in the process of doing.

• Matthew Bright scripted the Drew Barrymore sleeper Guncrazy (1992) and then achieved greatness anew by writing and directing the sick-humored Red Riding Hood revamp Freeway (1996) with Reese Witherspoon, in a mode eons away from the darling American sweetheart she’d become.

Bright then made Freeway II: Confessions of a Trick Baby (1999), which is peppered with brilliance but done in by Natasha Lyonne’s off-the-mark performance, and he cranked out Ted Bundy (2001), which is worthless save for the bare bo-bo’s of Boti Bliss.

Tiptoes (2003) should have been yet another bizarro-feature in Bright’s crooked cap. It stars Gary Oldman as a dwarf and Matthew McConaughey as his normal sized brother. But it’s not good.

At Tiptoes‘ Sundance Film Festival premiere, Bright exploded in a public rage, claiming that producers tore him off the project right after filming and that he hadn’t seen, nor would he ever see, the finished movie.

And that’s the last we’ve heard from Matthew Bright.

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NUMBER 14
Linda Blair/Sybil Danning
CHAINED HEAT (1983)
(0:31)
New Fish Linda steps into the prison shower where Queen Dyke Sybil lays down the law about who lays down with who and how everything goes down (hubba-hubba) in their all-girl jailhouse hierarchy. Linda claims she wants no (private) part of Sybil, nor any of the anonymous naked inmates around them. Sybil force-French-kisses the newbie, in a climax of a scene featuring four of the most important D-cups in all of B-movies.

• Chained Heat is the Women in Prison Film to End All Women in Prison Films. That’s fitting as, curiously, it came out a full decade after the demise of the Women in Prison (WIP) film heyday.

Previously, the WIP flicks to beat starred Pam Grier and were directed by the mighty Jack Hill (Spider Baby, Switchblade Sisters): The Big Bird Cage (1972) and The Big Doll House (1973).

Caged Heat (1974) has its boosters, too; most pointedly Danny Peary, who included it in his original pantheon of Cult Movies.

• Certainly, Caged Heat has its points of interest. It was directed by Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Rachel Getting Married), and showcases drive-in goddesses Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith, Erica Gavin, and Roberta Collins … plus, it clearly provided the naming template to which Chained Heat helped itself.

For me, though, Caged Heat is too arch and arty, and it never makes proper use of it A-plus-plus T&A talent. There is a decisive lack of exploitation  - a claim that could never possibly be leveled against Chained Heat.

• Just ponder Chained Heat’s plot: Linda Blair is wrongly locked up, where she runs afoul of lesbian gang leader Sybil Danning and warden John Vernon - Dean Wormer from Animal House - who uses inmates to make porn videos in his prison office hot-tub.

Amazingly, Blair and Vernon locked horns just a year later in Savage Streets, a remarkable potboiler with 26-year-old Linda as a crossbow-wielding teen vigilante and Big John as her corrupt high-school principal.

• Linda Blair going from lil’ Exorcist Academy Award nominee to her ’80s reinvention as Rick James‘ personal superfreak, Oui magazine snatch-spreader, and grindhouse headliner is endlessly compelling.

She even gets topless lesbo-raped by Sylvia Kristel in the rollicking Chained Heat rip-off, Red Heat (1985).

But let’s throw two huge sacks of love onto Sibyl Danning here, too. Her filmography ranks among the most stellar in the cult movie canon and who, unlike Linda, never got guest shots on The Love Boat and/or Fantasy Island.

Sybil has been a giant from her explicit girl-girl intercourse in The Erotic Adventures of Siegfried (1971) and Bluebeard (1972) to the freaky slasher/teen-comedy hybrid They’re Playing With Fire (1984) to Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985) to her regal turn as Contessa Lucianna in Andy Sidaris’s Malibu Express (1985).

On top(less) of that, Sybil hosted the indispensable quasi-legal VHS compilation, Famous T&A (1982).

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NUMBER 13
Pam Grier
COFFY (1973)
(0:38)
Nurse by day, avenging angel by night, Pam strips out of an orange jumpsuit and giant puka-shell necklace to bedazzle some soul-brother sucker with her voluminous voluptuousness - and then let him have it. But not in the way he wants it.

• One cannot overpraise or undervalue Pam Grier’s place in the grindhouse pantheon.

She is the undisputed Queen of Blaxploitation - “The Baddest Blacktress That Ever Was!” - a charismatic and multitalented performer, and one of history’s all-time most transfixing beauties.

Of the films she is most famous for, the best - The Big Bird Cage, The Big Doll House, Coffy, Foxy Brown (1974) - were directed by action master Jack Hill.

But just think about how Pam debuted in the Russ Meyer masterpiece Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), and then her career only got more interesting from there.

• Let’s run through the Pam-theon of Greats: Eddie Romero’s Filipino Dr. Moreau freakout, Twilight People (1971); the instant, unofficial Get Carter remake Hit Man (1972); chained to Margaret Markov in Black Mama, White Mama (1973); the self-explanatory Scream Blacula Scream (1973); the Mandingo sequel Drum (1976); Fort Apache the Bronx (1981); Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983); Steven Seagal’s breakthrough Above the Law (1988); Mark Lester’s Class of 1984 follow-up, Class of 1999 (1990); and Larry Cohen’s blaxploitaiton reunion Original Gangstas (1996).

All this led to her Quentin Tarantino “comeback” vehicle, Jackie Brown (1997), from which Pam scored a lot of high-profile work, including a strictly dickly role on Showtime’s lady-lovapalooze, The L Word.

• No tagline will ever ring more true than this one: “Pam Grier is Coffy. She’ll cream ya!”

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NUMBER 12
Dyanne Thorne
ILSA, HAREM KEEPER OF THE OIL SHEIKS (1976)
(1:15)
Following a slave-girl uprising, evil Ilsa is hung up by her wrists and served topless to the cracked, oozing hands of a grubby leper. The lucky lep then grabs, paws, poke, prods, and rubs his diseased meat-hooks all over her fascist funbags, much to the delight of newly liberated prisoners and sheik lackeys.

• So why Harem Keeper of the Oil Shieks over She Wolf of the SS?

Because this is a list of the Top 100 Cult Movie Nude Scenes, and Dyanne Thorne - Ilsa herself - is simply more satisfyingly naked in this sequel than she is in the original.

Of course, her uniform in She Wolf is sexier than anything she (or anybody) wears anywhere else but, again, we’re talking nudiness here, not simple totalitarian heat.

• Plus, for all the infinite pleasures of She Wolf, Harem Keeper is an eminently worthy follow-up with unique charms all its own.

First, it’s nice to see dairy queens Uschi Digard and Sharon Kelly return, even though their characters had been killed the first time - just like Ilsa herself. And Haji’s herefor this go-rounde, too!

The unacknowledged time jump is also amusing, with Ilsa not aging a day - nor mellowing a smidgeon - between 1945 and 1974.

And I’ve always loved Richard Kennedy as Kaiser, the stand-in for Henry Kissinger who simply can’t turn down the adolescent male bedmate supplied to him by sheik El Sharif.

It tops 1976’s other great Kissingersploitation moment, courtesy of Bloodsucking Freaks, where Master Sardu (Seamus O’Brien) is taking an order for white slaves from his regular Washington D.C. customer, “Henry.”

• My favorite moment in the entire series occurs in Ilsa the Wicked Warden (1980), which isn’t even an official entry - it was shot by Jess Franco as Greta the Wicked Warden, then retitled and redubbed to capitalize Ilsamania - but which beats every body fluid out of Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia (1977), which serves as Ilsa’s Godfather Part III.

The scene: wicked warden Ilsa inserts several dozen sewing pins into the huge boobs of her lesbian lover, Lina Romay, then presses her nude body on top of them.

Truly, that was a trick I had not seen (nor tried) before, nor have I seen it since (no comment as to whether or not I ever got around to trying it).

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NUMBER 11
Laura Gemser/Mónica Zanchi
EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS (1977)
(0:29)
Frolicking about a lovely lagoon on a sunny tropical island leads Laura to lilting lesbianism with Mónica Zanchi - while a cigarette-smoking chimpanzee eyeballs their antics, puffing with high approval.

• With a body of work like Laura Gemser’s - and what a piece of work her body is, oh! - how does one single out just one scene from just one movie?

My initial inclination was to go right to her most notorious effort, Emanuelle in America, but I dissected that sufficiently in the piece on Deborah Harry in Videodrome - the movie inspired by filmmaker David Cronenberg’s disgust with Emanuelle in America.

For sheer bozack-sapping heat, you can not beat beating off to Laura as a Thai massage girl using her soapy body as a loofah on Sylvia Kristel and other white-devil decadents in Emmanuelle 2 (1975).

But it’s important to honor Laura for her signature Black Emanuelle cycle, and preferably in a film directed by her most frequent collaborator, Italian shock maestro Joe D’Amato.

That leaves more than 20 titles to consider, from Emanuelle in Bangkok (1976) all the way up to Top Model (1988).

Lesbo action is another must - but that hardly reduces the field.

So it comes down to this: only Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals meets all previous criteria, plus it features a voyeuristic, cancer-stick-sucking chimp.

We have a winner.

• Part of the Black Emanuelle movies’ infinite allure is their unpredictability.

The one recurring through-line (in most) is that Laura’s Emanuelle is an adventurous journalist, always off to investigate some situation guaranteed to get her out of her clothes.

Sometimes, her beat can be as innocuous as Asian sex tours, as in Emanuelle in Bangkok, but in other instances, the titles speak for themselves; e.g. - Emanuelle Vs. Violence Against Women (1977), Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade (1977), and Emanuelle’s Daughter: Queen of Sados (1979).

It’s a hoot, of course, that the most barbaric and grotesque of the series is innocuously called Emanuelle in America, but each of the Black Emanuelle films bears dozens of alternate names, and almost all were repackaged countless times as romantic soft porn in the fledgling days of home video.

Talk about a masturbate and switch job, although for some of us, the out-of-nowhere gore, rape, and torture came as the most glorious (and addicting) of surprises.

• I caught Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals under the title Trap Them and Kill Them one early morning at Cine 42 in 1986. That’s how long the movie had been bouncing around Times Square.

Cine 42 is one of the most unsung Deuce grindhouses but, in my experience, it was always the wildest. It was also among the last to shut down.

Unlike its neighbors, Cine 42 was not a crashed-and-burnt movie palace from 42^nd Street’s high-gloss glory days. It was a brick building cleaved into a duplex, with each half showing triple features that began at 10 in the morning and wrapping up some time after 2am. The seats were plastic. The crack pipes were permanently ignited. And if you had two quarters in your pocket, blowjobs were always available.

What stood out the most was how often Cine 42 changed features. It seemed like a dozen different movies played there some weeks, including many that never landed at the other theaters.

It was always packed, too. For a brief period there was even a Cine 43 around the block. I wasn’t surprised, then, when Cine 42 was one of the last trash-pit theaters standing on the Deuce, surviving all the way to the end of 1992.

And then there were the Selwyn and the Harris (plus a quickly constructed, bullshit six-screen multiplex where the Anco used to be), until there were none.

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And so now we come to the mountaintop. Or, more accurately: the mountains, topless.

The Top 10 Cult Movie Nude Scenes of All Time looms next.

Here’s where you should start getting scared and/or furious if your favorites remain AWOL.

Comment below. Fill me in on your emotions.

I’m in you. You’re in me.

‘Cause you gave me the love, the love that I never had.

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