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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