Bolero (1984) notes
1. This movie helped blow up MGM’s distribution deal with Cannon.Bolero was supposed to go out through MGM as part of Cannon’s distribution arrangement, but MGM chief Frank Yablans reportedly hated it, especially with the likely X-rating problem. Cannon ultimately released it themselves unrated, and Bolero became part of the mess MGM used to sever ties with Cannon.
On-mic angle: “So this isn’t just a bad movie. This is a bad movie with enough blast radius to damage a studio relationship.”
2. It was released unrated because of the X-rating issue. The film was reportedly refused cuts to avoid an X, so Cannon released it without an MPAA rating, with ads saying no one under 17 would be admitted. Many chains that avoided X-rated films also avoided Bolero.
3. The box office is weirdly not catastrophic at first glance. It opened to about $4.58 million and finished with about $8.91 million domestic. Reported budget was around $7 million, so it technically grossed above budget, but that is before marketing, distribution cuts, and the damage caused by limited playability.
4. It is a Razzie superweapon.Bolero scored nine Razzie nominations for 1984 and won six, including Worst Picture, Worst Actress for Bo Derek, Worst Director and Worst Screenplay for John Derek. The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that Bolero had been nominated in nine of the ten Razzie categories.
5. The critical consensus was: somehow both too horny and too boring. Metacritic lists it at 13, based on 9 reviews, with 0 positive and 0 mixed reviews. Time Out called it “sustained, tawdry silliness,” while the Miami Herald line preserved by Metacritic says John Derek “failed to make Bo look sexy” and instead made her look “dull and foolish.”
6 The New York Times review gives you a great bottom-five bridge. Janet Maslin wrote that the plot “sounds like that of a straight porn film” and said John Derek shows off Bo in an “oddly self-contradictory way.”
On-mic angle: “That’s basically our Bottom Five thesis: sleaze trying to wear a tuxedo, but the tuxedo is open to the navel.”
7. Olivia d’Abo being in this is genuinely uncomfortable context. Multiple sources note Olivia d’Abo was very young during filming, and the film’s use of nudity around her has become one of the more disturbing parts of its legacy. CREEPY.
8. The title is also a weird self-own. Ebert points out that “Bolero” invokes Ravel’s piece from 10, where Bo Derek became iconic, so the title is almost branding the movie as “remember that hotter, better movie where Bo Derek mattered?”
9. The behind-the-scenes blame game is wonderfully Cannon-esque. Accounts differ wildly: Golan allegedly said John Derek refused to make the movie commercially viable; the Dereks claimed Cannon pushed for more explicit sex; there were also stories about overspending, firings, and disputes over publicity photos.
10. George Kennedy? White-haired papa cranky from countless films and television shows in everything from Cool Hand Luke and The Dirty Dozen to Earthquake and The Naked Gun! He’s giving way too much to this.
11. Elmer Bernstein scored the sex scenes while his son, Peter Bernstein wrote the rest of the “cellos in overdrive score. Elmer scored more than 150 films including Cape Fear, The Magnificent Seven, Stripes, Animal House and Ghostbusters. Holy crap, does he ever deserve a bow here.
12. Bo Derek gets way too much flack for her role in all of this – almost like she’s put up on a cross for her husband – and the producers’ – sins. She can act. She is charming. She is positively radiant. And she was saddled with a total a-hole of a showboat husband who she somehow stayed married to until his death in 1998. She would later scoop up hot stuff
Bottom Five Sleazy Art Films
There reason I came up with “Bottom Five Sleazy Art Films” to pair with Bolero is probably obvious and doesn’t require much explanation after we just sat through John Derek’s latest attempt to disguise “filming my hot wife” as high art. But my picks for this list go a little deeper than the Bo Derek/John Derek/Sheri Moon Zombie/Rob Zombie school of non-humble-brag cinema.
All of these movies had reputations as beautifully-shot smut. Many of them I discovered as a budding adolescent who was far more interested in art-house, well-lit, carefully-composed sensual imagery than anything approaching harder pornography. Being raised on late-night Showtime and Cinemax fare like Private Lessons and Class, I genuinely thought adulthood was basically just older women seducing younger men and, honestly, I was fully on board with that worldview as long as it was in soft-lighting and everyone looked flawless.
But as my taste in film evolved alongside my dream of becoming a filmmaker, I discovered this strange subgenre of stylized smut that barely even tried to hide its tawdriness, directed by people like Jess Franco, Tinto Brass, and Walerian bo-ro-ukzik. Some of these made my list alongside more “legitimate” arthouse fare which critics praised for social commentary and thematic resonance, but if I’m being honest, teenage Jason mostly watched them because there was a whole lot of female nudity involved.
Because at the end of the day, while I was a budding filmmaker… I was also a budding teenager with premium cable and almost no parental supervision.
And right up front, let me say this: there is a WHOLE lot of male gaze happening in this list. Honestly, this may as well be a “Male Gaze Hall of Fame” countdown, pulling back the curtain on cinematic “art” and revealing either my own adolescent tastes or the filmmakers’ varying attempts to disguise and legitimize their own lusts.
The Lover (1992)
Jane March was an early-’90s crush of mine, and while this Jean-Jacques Annaud film based on the autobiographical work of novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras presents itself as highbrow cinema, let’s be serious here: much like my reasons for watching the Bruce Willis erotic thriller Color of Night, I watched this because I got to see Jane March naked.
And for 15-year-old Santo, that was an after-midnight snack that turned me into a sex-gremlin. (Why isn’t there a movie called “Sex Gremlin?”) I think we need to look into the viability of this.
Anyhow, back to The Lover. Let’s be honest: this movie is dullsville. Sure, it’s directed by the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Quest for Fire, The Name of the Rose, and The Bear, and yes, it’s gorgeously photographed by cinematographer Robert Fraisse, whose résumé includes Ronin, The Notebook, and Hotel Rwanda — more on him later — but come on. A film about an affair between a teenage girl and a wealthy Chinese man in 1929 colonial Indochina?
I wasn’t there for the moral unease of a family trading away their daughter for gifts from a wealthy property owner while his father threatens to disinherit him. It’s like if Trump fell in love with a much younger woman on Epstein’s Island and… oh wait. ANYHOW…
So yes, the film earned major award nominations, including an Oscar nod for Fraisse’s cinematography, but for teenage me, the only thing holding my attention was Jane March’s complete lack of bashfulness. And it’s pretense to even suppose anyone else who watched this wasn’t there for the same reason. Bunch of goddamn sex gremlins.
Immoral Tales (1974)
Released the same year I was born, this French production from Polish filmmaker Walerian bo-ro-ukzik is one of the purest examples of why critics once described him as “a genius who also happened to be a pornographer.”
Like The Lover, this thing is occasionally masterfully composed, with Borowczyk collaborating with multiple cinematographers while also taking camera duties himself. It’s a collection of erotic vignettes drenched in lush production design, elaborate costuming, poetic narration, and all sorts of faux-intellectual prestige.
It’s also dirty as fuck.
We’ve got yearning over church organ pipes, cucumbers, Christ imagery, and a retelling of the Countess Bathory legend featuring famed jewelry designer Paloma Picasso — daughter of Pablo Picasso — bathing in the blood of virgins.
So yes, there’s thematic “depth” here, but it also constantly feels like Borowczyk is challenging himself to be as explicit as humanly possible while stopping one inch short of actual penetration.
That became his whole career lane. Unfortunately, by the end of his career, he basically abandoned any remaining artifice and went full smut factory with films like Emmanuelle 5 — and somehow that still wasn’t the end of the Emmanuelle series as it would go on for two more installments.
Immoral Tales ends up being more pretentious than titillating, losing itself in endless rumination about the nature of sex and life and death and oh who gives a shit? It’s full of boobs, bums and bush, and that’s 100% the only reason anyone still even knows it exists.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
This one is more “ugly smut” arthouse cinema, but I must have watched it 20 times just to see Helen Mirren wearing a see-thru John-Paul Gautier bra while giving head in a restaurant bathroom.
The movie itself isn’t remotely interested in traditional titillation. For me, it occupies the same uncomfortable space as David Cronenberg’s Crash — that weird area where a movie is so disturbing that you start wondering if you’re OK for finding parts of it erotic.
Visually, though, it’s extraordinary. The lighting and color palettes are as bold and vivid as anything in Dario Argent’s Suspiria. Directed by British director Peter Greenaway, the man behind films like Prospero’s Books and 8½ Women, it’s shot by — of course — a French cinematographer named Sacha Vierny whose incredible painterly compositions and slow, measured camera moves define its memorable asthetic.
But eventually the movie completely loses me.
By the time the gangster Spica — played by the OG Dumbledore, actor Michael Gambon — is literally eating the penis of a cooked corpse, I’m checked out. The weird-ass plot becomes even more grating than Michael Nyman’s intentionally repetitive, satirical score.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1981)
Lady Chatterley’s Lover — The collaborations between Just Jaeckin and Sylvia Kristel honestly deserve their own Bottom Five list, but this Cannon Films production – and cousin to our main review in that regard – may be the crown jewel of magnificently dull trash-art cinema.
As the guy who helmed the original Emmanuelle as well as the Tawny Kitaen-starring freak-fest called The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak, Lady Chatterly is loaded with Jaeckin’s trademark soft lighting, dreamy compositions, and melancholic harpsichord-heavy score work. And visually? It’s genuinely beautiful.
But why is it terrible?
Not because Sylvia Kristel spends half the runtime naked and writhing around in melodramatic ecstasy. No, the real problem is that for the other half, the movie expects us to care about Lady Chatterley’s emotional conflict between her gamekeeper lover and her wounded aristocratic husband — a rich cuckold who suddenly objects once she catches actual feelings instead of just engaging in quick rolls in the hay.
The whole thing is overacted, sluggish, and hilariously ham-fisted, which probably explains why D.H. Lawrence’s novel has been adapted repeatedly ever since this version bored audiences back in the early ’80s.
That said, the imagery is incredible, and once again we have cinematographer Robert Fraisse behind the camera coating everything in gauzy, sensual loveliness. Turns out The Lover wasn’t a fluke — Fraisse also shot Story of O and Emmanuelle 2, so clearly our man found his professional calling.
Room in Rome (2010)
I’ve spent this whole list talking about the French, but now it’s finally time for the true pervs of Europe to enter the chat: the Spanish.
Or the Basque, technically.
Director Julio Medem might bristle at being called Spanish since he’s from Basque Country, but regardless, Room in Rome is basically the movie I wanted every early-’90s erotic art film to be.
It’s so committed to the male gaze that it almost removes men from the equation entirely, focusing instead on two beautiful women exploring each other sexually in a hotel room in Rome while remaining naked for approximately 70% of the runtime.
Actresses Elena Anaya and Natasha Yarovenko do their absolute best with painfully overwritten dialogue and a deeply male-idealized fantasy of lesbian intimacy, but let’s be honest: this movie exists almost entirely to linger on gorgeous women kissing, moaning, showering, and rolling around in soft lighting.
And somehow… it’s still boring.
Do you understand the level of cinematic horse-shittery required for me to become bored watching beautiful women hooking up for nearly two straight hours?
And then the third act completely flies off the rails. One of the women catches feelings, stares at a Cupid painting on the bathroom ceiling, imagines herself being struck by a love arrow, and metaphorically bleeds out in a bathtub.
What an absolute mess of a movie.
But hey… it’s art.
Or at least it really wants you to think it is.