William Hurt’s sleazebag Florida lawyer, Ned Racine, is the hapless dupe to Kathleen Turner’s rich, unhappily married beauty in this sweaty genre high-water mark. Turner’s manipulative bombshell, Matty Walker, is so many steps ahead of her outmatched lover – and just about everyone else in Florida – that there’s moments when you practically feel her pausing to let them all catch up a bit. The sex, of which there’s a lot, is relentless in a way that even has poor Racine complaining about the state of his neds at one point (get some more ice on there, mate). But it’s always in service to a noirish plot that director Lawrence Kasdan marshals with supreme discipline as he charts two genuinely terrible people jettisoning their morals, professionalism, pants… the lot.
If you’ve followed the online discourse lately, then you’re aware that cinematic sex isn’t as popular as it used to be – even progressive-minded zoomers recoil at the thought of watching two people get it on onscreen. That was not the case in the 1980s and ‘90s, when erotic thrillers ruled the multiplex. Back then, you could hardly avoid gazing upon Michael Douglas’s bare ass whenever you stepped into the theatre, and you were always happy to see it.
It was truly the glory days of lurid entertainment. And then, sometime around the turn of the millennium, it just kind of ended. It’s hard to say if the sudden disappearance of major studio erotic thrillers contributed to this current cultural prudishness or if the country’s puritanical shift is what caused the genre to fall out of favour. Either way, for those of us who lived through their heyday, they are sorely missed. For all their frequent trashiness and problematic sexual values, at least they were movies aimed squarely at adults – something that can’t be said for half the major releases coming out today. For that reason, we’ve decided to revisit (and rank) 35 of the all-time best erotic thrillers. Many of them now register as even sleazier and skeevier than they did when they first came out – but that might be the exact reason we love them so much.
Recommended:
🍆 The 101 best sex scenes in movies
😬 The 100 best thriller movies of all-time
😍 The 100 best romantic films of all-time
🕵️ 40 murder mystery movies to test your sleuthing skills to the max
🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time