I remember the salacious VHS box for Smooth Talk that sat in the drama section of just about every video store I worked in sometime in the late ’90s, with perennial crush Laura Dern barely clothed as a lascivious Treat Williams stood behind her like the leering bastard he is, at least in this flick.

Even though I never rented it, I stared at that cover every time I passed it. Now having seen it, I’ll admit I felt a little guilt and a lot of perversion for lusting after it, especially upon learning that Dern is a sophomore in high school — even I have my boundaries, people!

Based on a short story by Joyce Carol Oates and directed by documentarian Joyce Chopra, Smooth Talk stars Dern as Connie, a precociously sexual young woman who happens to be the black sheep of her family. While Dad dotes and Mom nags, Connie spends most of her time flirting with boys at the mall and, soon enough, at the local redneck bar.

A sleazy older man by the name of Friend (Williams, at his scummiest) takes a fully erect liking to her, at one point coming to her house and literally wearing her down so she’ll go to an empty field and have sex with him, which does a good job of making the formerly loving act into an ambiguous one I’d be happy to forget about.

I guess there are many things I’m missing about this girl’s budding sexuality, but they’re hard to see every time Williams is onscreen, his diseased sexuality dripping off every frame. I guess it’s mostly surprising this was broadcast on the PBS anthology series American Playhouse, but I’ve been surprised before. —Louis Fowler

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Serge Gainsbourg is held up, by me, as the undisputed master of Parisian perversity, audibly in his music and visually in his films. With titles like the exhibitionist Stan the Flasher or the incestuous Charlotte for Ever, he’s one of the few directors who continually lived up to the devious promises of his first flick, Je T’aime Moi Non Plus.

Warhol himbo Joe Dallesandro is the über-trashy Krassky, a homosexual garbage man who dumps refuse with his clingy boyfriend, the homicidally jealous Padovan. When they stop for lunch at a run-down diner, he meets Johnny (Gainsbourg’s then-wife, Jane Birkin), a noticeably androgynous waitress desperate for some sort of human connection.

In many beautifully filmed scenes of raw attraction put to a gorgeously lush soundtrack, the two fall in inseparable love, but when it comes time for hetero-intercourse, Krassky can only perform one way, and I’m sure you know what that is: wholly stereotyped searing anal, of course, causing absolute pain for Johnny, whose dry screaming gets them thrown out of every motel in town.

They eventually find sexual solace in the back of his garbage truck.

While some have called Je T’aime misogynistic — the brutal finale makes it an absolutely hard accusation to fight — this un-love story shared its title with the notorious Gainsbourg/Birkin tune of the same name, a lust-filled romp that, though not as sweet, is a cynical view of diseased love like many of his songs. With a pedigree like that, it’s strange his films aren’t held up as the sleaze-filled treasures they should be. —Louis Fowler

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Breed The Lawnmower Man in a three-way with Ghost in the Machine and, oh, Animal Instincts 3, and you still haven’t come close to the direct-to-analog-tape atrocity that is Virtual Girl. The softcore stinker wallows in a league almost to itself: erotic thrillers dependent on immediately dated bleep-blop-bloop internet technology of the late ’90s. All it’s missing is an upon-climax cry of “You’ve got mail!”

From Richard Gabai, the multihyphenate behind 1989’s Assault of the Party Nerds, this li’l flick of tits, bits and bytes begins as a computer-generated sex doll named Virtuality (played with arched, harshly penciled eyebrows by Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo eye candy Charlie Curtis) destroys her program’s creator because what he saw in his lascivious invention wasn’t hearts, but dollar signs.

Enter John Lewis, the studly, happily married man played by a debuting Max Dixon (who not only failed to appear in the 2001 sequel, but every screen project since). As the ace glitch-catcher at the software company where Virtual Girl is under development, John takes the program for a test drive and gets all hot and sweaty — heck, who wouldn’t? — yet is able to resist temptation and Virtuality’s rather comely come-ons. In a movie like this, however, it’s only a matter of time before they’re boning on the regular.

Virtual Girl puts the “seedy” in “CD-ROM” by offering skin, skin and skin in scene after scene. Wanting to pleasure John’s every desire during a roll in the virtual hay, Virtuality full-body morphs into a number of different-looking vixens, each with progressively manmade, awkwardly nippled breasts. He digs it, because he’s not getting any from his wife (Meatballs 4’s Miche Straube). Soon, Virtuality wants him all for herself, so she messes with his home security system, personal computer and bank account, just to show she’s got him by the balls. Fantasy though she may be, this lingerie-clad lady has a murderous streak in her hot bod: One corporate schmo gets his hands melted onto his keyboard; another programmer engaging in cybersex has his head blown off.

Full of cheesy, instantly obsolete computer animations of giant skeletons and spaceships, Gabai’s Girl is one of those movies where a crew member’s last name is listed as “Hughpenis” in the credits, because you just know he’d thought it’d be a real gas. It’s also one of those movies — and this has gotta be a first — where said credits end with a mailing address to which viewers can write and ask questions about the picture. Two decades later, my letter remains unanswered. Damn you, Virtual Girl! —Ed Donovan

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Within the first few minutes of Shining Sex, we find Jess Franco’s muse Lina Romay (Revenge in the House of Usher) plumping up her breasts and vagina to a tune that sounds like Procol Harum’s Matthew Fisher jamming on the Hammond. As her bare pubis humps the heck out of some shag carpeting, an emotionless couple admires her with dead eyes, inviting her over for the night.

Once there, Lina and the couple spend long periods of time mostly tongue kissing and rubbing nipples, all shown in extremely long and lugubrious detail. As she shakily orgasms after being penetrated by a small porcelain hand, Franco himself shows up miles away as a handicapped scientist babbling on about “hearing things.”

Between travelogues of Spanish castles and other beautiful scenes of the European countryside, after getting mystical lotion rubbed on her nude body, Lina is apparently possessed by some sort of “superior force” from another dimension which, of course, leads to even more loose and languid sex, the only true excitement coming from a constantly moaning Franco.

It’s a somewhat intriguing screenplay that probably could have been fleshed out — no pun intended — a bit more, but then I remembered this was Franco and we’re lucky we got this much of a story. Essentially a vehicle to show off Lina’s constantly spread genitalia, it’s films like this that make it hard — so to speak — to truly dislike a filmmaker like Franco. —Louis Fowler

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As much as it sounds like a ribald musical notation, Pervertissima instead takes us into the world of sleazy French journalism as a comely young girl with a possible herpes sore on her upper lip and absolutely no reporting skills is sent into Gay Paree for a piece on “Love in Paris.”

Admitting she’s a virgin to the overt sexaholics on the paper’s staff, she is sent to brothels, dance clubs and an avant garde sex ritual, none of which has anything to do with love, but I guess I see the point. What I don’t see the point of is how she ends up in the clinic of a mad scientist who dreams of ruling the world like a god — his words — through ineffectual mating experiments.

And as jarring as the switch from a low-rent skin flick to a no-scares horror movie is, even that is nothing compared to the horrendous sexual harassment the females of the film go through, from the boss randomly kissing secretaries quite passionately to a rapist reporter who, in the middle of a meeting, tries to get off on our lead actress. Maybe Mad Men was right?

Regardless, this bizarre mélange of fragrant trash is best credited to director Jean-Louis van Belle, known for equally de-rousing flicks like Forbidden Paris, The Lady Kills and Made in Sex, all of which sounds like great names for terrible New Romantic bands. —Louis Fowler

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