Die-hard fans around the world have been waiting with bated breath for the highly-anticipated big screen adaptation of E.L. James' worldwide bestseller, "Fifty Shades Of Grey" which stars Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey and Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele. However, the erotic romance failed to make the final cut in Malaysian, Cambodian and Indonesian cinemas due to the nature of its content that is deemed highly inappropriate. Guess Southeast Asian fans of the novels will have to either catch the movie in Singapore where it is released today with a R21 rating, or if you're just hungry for some steamy and sexy movies this Valentines, put a hold on your whips cause we got these other movies you can check out instead!
Believe it or not, Adrian Lyne's "9 ½ Weeks" was both a commercial flop and a critical disaster during the time of its cinema release back in 1986. But this erotic drama gained a subsequent cult-classic status upon its release on video home system (VHS) cassette tape and became one of the landmark genres for countless mainstream and B-grade movies in the future. The movie is more like watching an extended music video featuring a lot of moody compositions. But beneath all the empty-headed plot and uninspired dialogue, "9 ½ Weeks" was hugely popular for its then-imaginative sex scenes including the one where John (Mickey Rourke) uses chocolate syrup and strawberries against Elizabeth (Kim Basinger) as sex objects.
At the time of its release in 1992, "Basic Instinct" was a controversial movie for its graphic depiction of sex and violence. Despite the controversy, it was a huge success at the box office and turned then-unknown actress Sharon Stone into an overnight sensation for her icy portrayal as Catherine Tramell. The movie was, of course, best known for its much talked-about police interrogation scene in which Catherine crosses her leg and revealed to the interrogators that she didn't wear any underwear beneath her skirt.
Based on Claude Chabrol's notoriously icy "La Femme Infidele" (1965), Adrian Lyne's Hollywood version of "Unfaithful" was nothing more than a standard domestic drama about a wife (Diane Lane) committing adultery with a handsome stranger (Olivier Martinez). However, the movie was best known for Diane Lane's Oscar-nominated performance as well as some of the steamy sex scenes featured in the movie, including the one taking place in a restaurant bathroom, and another one in the hallway of an apartment building.
Between late '90s and mid '2000s, South Korean cinema has produced some of the most erotically-charged movies that made Hollywood's erotic genre looks relatively tame by comparison. Among the best genre of its kind ever seen in the South Korean cinema was Kim Tae-Eun's "The Intimate". The movie itself wasn't much to recommend about in terms of characters and plot, but it was best remembered for a number of memorable explicit sex scenes between Jo Dong-Hyuk and Sung Hyun-Ah ("Cello").
Ang Lee's highly-controversial spy drama "Lust, Caution" was admittedly way too long and hardly justified its 157-minute runtime. But the movie was a benchmark for pushing the envelope of the NC-17 rating (a classification that is "suitable for adults only") for a Chinese cinema for its graphic sex scenes between Hong Kong's Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and China's then-unknown Tang Wei.