Erotic thrillers, risqué romances, art-house explorations of sensuality — your average video store is full of options for folks who can’t quite work up the nerve to head to the corner porn shop. Some of them are surprisingly steamy, and most are at least competent enough for viewers to accomplish the task at hand (ahem), but there’s also a sizeable number that are miles from titillating. Whether through incompetence or simple mismarketing, these are movies that could not be less erotic.

• 9 1/2 Weeks (1986) — As a teenage boy, three friends and I hightailed it over to the local video store to rent the so-called erotic classic 9 1/2 Weeks, starring Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. Despite a top-hat striptease, a blond bombshell in stockings and more nookie than I had ever seen on screen, the food seduction scene left me wondering how they were going to clean the honey out of their privates. This unsexiness would go on to pervade all of director Adrian Lynne’s subsequent films and most of Rourke’s straight-to-video erotic thrillers.

JASON LEWIS

• Bad Timing (1980) — Nothing can soil a beloved musician’s legacy like the image of him having very graphic and non-consensual sex on film. Art Garfunkel stars in Nicolas Roeg’s 1980 film Bad Timing, billed as “a terrifying love story.” And terrifying it is. Garfunkel stars as a psychiatrist who becomes obsessed with his married lover. While he is kind of creepy throughout, the film’s final scene (apologies for spoiling), in which a stark-naked Garfunkel has a spiritual moment while raping his unconscious girlfriend, is the least sexy “sex” scene imaginable. Hello darkness my old friend, indeed.

ELIZABETH CHORNEY-BOOTH

• Double Agent 73 (1974) — This has got to be the most thoroughly wretched sexploitation flick I've ever seen, and I've seen some doozies. Directed by notorious anti-auteur Doris Wishman, it's one of two films to pair the horribly untalented director with non-actress “star” Chesty Morgan, a stripper famous for her 73-inch bust.

Here, Chesty plays a secret agent who has a spy camera surgically implanted into her left boob. Whenever she needs to snap a picture, she takes off her top and hoists her breast as a click and a flash of light indicate that the camera has been activated. This usually happens after Chesty has killed a bad guy, to make sure that she's terminated the correct target (a rather haphazard way of conducting covert ops.) Chesty looks terrible in this picture. Her freakish bazooms hang to her waist, and her sour, unchanging facial expression says only “God these things are heavy!”

JOHN TEBBUTT

• Exotica (1994) — Based around a Toronto strip club that shares the film's title, Atom Egoyan's Exotica tells the story of four extremely damaged people spiraling toward redemption, destruction or — as the film's riveting final minutes suggest — both. Structured like a striptease, Egoyan's non-linear structure peels away narrative layers with maddening coyness, revealing the dark secret at the centre of all four protagonists' lives. The last scene is the cinematic equivalent of a full-frontal. The awful truth is finally revealed — the panties finally come off — but it isn't excitement for narrative closure that you feel. It's heart-rending, hair-pulling guilt for having watched the lives of four hopeless souls crumble around them.

KYLE FRANCIS

• Henry and June (1990) — OK, there are parts of this movie that are sexy, I can’t deny it. It has some serious problems, though, the biggest of which is the Henry Miller character, played by Fred Ward. You can smell the aging male body odour and stale cigarettes wafting around his monk-like bald head right through the screen. The odour is most pronounced when he is writhing uncomfortably on top of, underneath or beside Anais Nin, played by Maria de Medeiros, who resembles a mousy schoolgirl.

If that’s not enough to turn you off, Richard Grant, who plays Nin’s husband, sounds like Dave Chapelle imitating a white man, and insists on calling his wife Pussy Willow or Kiddo. Miller, meanwhile, pronounces Nin’s first name as “Anus.”

This is an old-man-fucking-young-woman movie that left me craving not some hot loving, but a cigarette and a cleansing bath.

DREW ANDERSON

• Showgirls (1995) — You could make the argument that Paul Verhoeven knew exactly what he was doing when he made this one. After all, the director had already used over-the-top sex and violence to mask surprisingly smart flicks (Robocop and Basic Instinct) and would go on to make one of the decade’s most subversive satires by hiding his politics behind crowd-pleasing gratuity (Starship Troopers). However, viewers hoping to be turned on by Showgirls need only find a clip of the hot-tub sex scene online to realize how misguided they are. Elizabeth Berkley, fresh from Saved by the Bell, flails around like a fish being electrocuted in a scene that should be used in abstinence awareness videos. It’s not so much sexy as soul-crushingly terrifying.

PETER HEMMINGER