Somehow we overlooked this gem during both CG week and our roundup of scary sex scenes. We're even more embarrassed that we somehow missed this great moment of terrifying fellatio:

In Thralls, a group of five women are neither vampire nor human, cursed with the need to feed on human blood but unable to turn others. And they need to become free from their demonic master — so they open an underground rave club. You know it makes perfect sense. Thanks to Madeline Ashby for suggesting this one!

Thanks to re-editing Quinto's audiobook version of the movie novelization, the internet now has Spork:

There's even an MP3 version and transcript for those who are allergic to YouTube. Here's an excerpt:

Working his way downward, his fingers appraised, knowingly, precisely. Spock knelt and placed his hands on his chest, driven to his knees by an overwhelming desire. His examining fingers had traveled as far as his thighs. After a long moment he looked up at Kirk. "I am always open to suggestions," Spock declared. Erect in the command chair, Kirk was not surprised to find that he was enjoying himself. "Suck me," Kirk opined plaintively.

You know you want more.

(Thanks, Carla)

SPORK! AN EROTIC LOVE STORY [ONTD_Startrek]

Apparently the ultra-limited edition of her expanded first album includes a booklet with these pics (and others) but also a lock of Lady GaGa's hair. [Daily Mail]

So in Witches Of Breastwick, there's an ancient witch who died or something, and now she fucks men to death if they come too close to her cabin. And a group of young witches have their eye on some strapping young dude whom they want to sacrifice to her. Meanwhile, Bare Wench Project is pretty much what you'd expect: A group of people ventures into the woods and discovers the sinister truth behind the Bare Wench, who makes them horny:

And here's what happens towards the end of the movie, when everything is unraveling and the Bare Wench has them in her sway:

So what do you think?

This soft-core mindbender from the mid-1980s was directed by none other than Just Jaeckin, the French filmmaker who brought the classic flesh flick Emmanuel to the world in 1974. Apparently he wanted to try his hand at science fiction, and the result is this bizarre tale of Gwendoline's search for the elusive, unnamed butterfly her dead father once sought. It begins as a sort of Raiders of the Lost Ark adventure, with Gwendoline wandering around in various "savage" countries (?), meeting rapscallions and her plucky pal Beth while being yelled at in untranslated Chinese by random people.

At last she and Beth find a guy named Willard to take them to the forbidding Land of the Yik Yak, where the butterfly is rumored to be. Unfortunately, nobody has ever survived the journey there, and in these clips you find out why! It turns out the Yik Yak are a female-dominated society of warriors who live in a vast underground city. For some reason, every part of the city is full of giant steampunky gears and other industrial objects that happen to have mostly-naked women in them. Why are there strange steamy machines with women popping in and out of them?

Luckily Gwendoline is able to cross-dress Willard as a woman (complete with fetching g-string), as you can see in the top clip. Then she stages a dramatic rescue of Beth from another inexplicable region full of water fetish scenes. Did Just Jaeckin travel through time and film this at Kink.com? I'm starting to wonder.

Anyway, everything ends happily, but not without more bared flesh and sex-hungry ladies attacking the lone man in their midst. This is a must-see, and perfect for Thanksgiving!

Gwendoline via IMDB

Thanks, Gregor and Lorena!

If phatic language is language which smooths over social tasks and reassures us rather than conveying information ("How's it going?" "Good, how about you?"), then phatic images are images which smooth over social issues, and they are one of Japan's biggest exports. From Hello Kitty to Pokémon to any number of big-eyed franchises, the Japanese love of kawaii (cuteness) is well known, parodied as just another weird Japanese thing in the Mister Sparkle episode of the Simpsons, but perhaps part of a common human urge. "We humans are a self-centered race," said Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics. To prove his point, McCloud drew a series of abstract squiggly shapes, then turned them into faces by adding a single element to each one: an eye. Instantly, the weird lines became noses and mouths, the random shapes turned into goofy faces.

It's comforting to imagine nonhuman things as humans, whether they're toys or vehicles, foods or animals, or Pipo-kun, the mascot of the Tokyo police force. For corporate mascots and advertising characters, the cuteness softens the message. To quote Mary Poppins, "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down."

A little sex in the sugar is even smoother. The male-dominated world of hardcore anime and manga fans had always had a taste for cheesecake, but in the '80s it had more of a science fiction and mecha edge; now, the girls themselves were growing in importance, as cutesy tweens and teens did cute things in shows like Azumanga Daioh (beloved by both 13-year-olds and grown men) and a variety of more "adult" anime and manga continuing the dubious tradition of the early '80s lolicon ("Lolita Complex") anime/manga subculture. Oldschool fans grumbled, bemoaning the loss of their hard sci-fi and their Gundam military action, but the kawaii-ization and, arguably, infantilization of geek culture marched on. Di Gi Charat, a 1998 gag manga about the green-haired, cat-eared, maid-outfit-wearing corporate mascot of the "Gamers" store chain, became popular enough to be spun off into a series of graphic novels and anime shows-the equivalent of a TV show based on Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar.

But Digiko merely worked at Gamers - she represented a cute, maid-outfit-wearing Gamers employee, not Gamers itself. On message boards and drawing desks, geek culture soon developed an even purer expression of cuteness, moe anthropomorphism, the representation of inanimate objects or concepts as cute girls. What better way to dress up boring, abstract concepts? Fans created Wikipe-tan, a character representing Wikipedia, and the OS-tans, based on various operating systems: a cat-themed Mac OS X girl, a gnu-horn-wearing Linux girl, etc. ("Tan" is the Japanese suffix "-chan" pronounced in a cutesy baby voice.) Nothing was safe from anthropomorphism. In Bincho-tan, the characters represent different kinds of charcoal. Demonbane reimagined the evil books of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, including the Necronomicon, as cute girls-the better to bond with the sorcerers who 'read' them, of course. Maru Asakura's manga 090 Eko to Issho ("090 Eko and Me") is a romantic comedy about cellphones who turn into girls. Like Life, a pornographic computer game "visual novel," features girls based not just on cell phones but vacuum cleaners, coffee pots, refrigerators and traffic lights-talk about objectification.

The predominant moe culture is one of sweetness and light and panty shots, but Japanese military & robot fans did not miss the moe bandwagon for long. Among the countless anthropomorphic experiments were robotized girls, aka mecha musume, made up of girls crossed with heavy equipment, robots, tanks, planes, etc. Cyborg doll/machine women have always had a huge following, and somewhere there must be a missing link between Battle Angel Alita's Gally, Ghost in the Shell's Major Kusanagi and Vikusen's Loli Airplane Machine.

Humikane Shimada, who coined the term "mecha musume," hit every fetish imaginable with Strike Witches, an alternate-universe WWII story whose heroes are young girls (check), magic-users (check), with animal ears and tails (check), who wear WWII airplane propellers on their legs like Transformers amputees or cybernetic stocking-fetishists (check, check, check, CHECK).

The magazine MC Axis, launched in 2006, focuses exclusively on the sexualized linkage of women's bodies and military weaponry.

Compared to this stuff, Yukio Hirai's Pixel Maritan is a mili-moe (military moe) manga you could show to your grandfather. The pink-haired Maritan, who first appeared in 2005 in a book/CD set intended to teach Japanese readers how to speak colloquial English, is the cartoon representation of the U.S. Marine Corps. Maritan's purpose is to teach Japanese fans how to swear like a Marine, through adorably testosterone-packed gag comics. "It's fucking English time!" reads the cover text on one of the several Maritan books. Within, you can learn phrases like "Your puny little ass is mine!" and "To show our appreciation for so much power, Marines keep heaven packed with fresh souls!", translated by actual Marine Corps members stationed in Japan.

Lightly digitized pictures of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein (Maritan's enemies) are common, and a photo section in the back shows Japanese women hanging out with Marines and riding tanks and so on. According to a friend who works on the series, the Marines stationed in Japan are generally fond of Maritan and eagerly contribute to all this. Maritan's origin story is a parody of so-called mahô shojo "magical girl" shows (like Sailor Moon), in which the heroine usually visits Earth from some fairy realm on a mission of good. In Maritan, the title character comes from the magical realm of Paris Island and introduces herself by crashing a fighter jet into the house of the "Japanese" character. Soon we meet Army-kun (a "dogface" private with dog ears), Navy-san and Jiei-tan, a diligent girl with glasses who represents the Japanese Self-Defense Force.

American military bases on Japanese soil are not exactly beloved by the populace, but Maritan's adulation of the American military, however ironic and hipsterified, shows that Japanese politics are still generally in line with the U.S., 60 years after World War II. Jiei-tan's most notable trait is a heavy book chained to her shoulders-the book represents Article 9 of the Post-WWII Japanese Constitution, which forbids Japan from maintaining any sort of armed forces. (The Japanese Self-Defense Force is technically an extension of the Japanese police). Japanese public opinion is generally pacifistic, but a sizeable minority supports overturning Article 9, with some fans of mili-moe probably among them. In 2004, at the request of the U.S., Japan deployed non-combat troops to Iraq, in the first foreign deployment of Japanese troops since WWII. For the deployment, Japan dusted off their 'official' military mascot, Prince Pickles, the sort of JSDF equivalent of Pipo-kun.

Pickles, together with the general concept that anime and manga might promote Japanese nationalism, was praised by Japan's then-Minister of Foreign Affairs, the right-wing anime lover Taro Aso. With his tubby salaryman-manga look, though, Prince Pickles looks distinctly behind the times, and his female companion, Miss Parsley, isn't exactly the cosplay choice du jour either. For really effective propaganda, the military-industrial complex has to be, you know, sexy.

"But the coals were murmuring of their mine, / And moans down there / Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men / Writhing for air," wrote the gay World War I poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) in his poem "Miners." Although moe usually refers to works about girls enjoyed by men, manga and anime have a large female readership too, and thus we enter the realm of bishonen ("beautiful boy") stories, which are often full of men writhing and moaning. In 2003, Hidekazu Himaruya, a Japanese designer/artist living in New York, started drawing a gag webcomic in which the countries involved in World War II were anthropomorphized as good-looking, endearingly incompetent boys. The strip proved so popular it was picked up by a print publisher, redrawn for the graphic novel editions, and adapted into an ongoing animated series. Hetalia Axis Powers was born.

Hetalia (available online here among other places) is an almost plotless reinterpretation of World War II with people, mostly boys, playing the role of countries. Germany is serious and hardworking (when the series begins, it is getting tired of making cuckoo clocks to repay its WWI debt to France); America is a gung-ho, hamburger-eating idiot; Japan is old-fashioned and mild-mannered; and Italy…well, Italy is a frivolous idiot who loves pasta and flirting with girls. (The series title, "Hetalia," is a composite of heta- ("bad/incompetent") and "Italy.")

The characters are theoretically at war, but the manga is basically a series of loosely connected gags about WWI-WWII trivia and, more often, the stereotypes of different countries/ethnicities. The manga is annotated by the creator, who points out little bits of WWII trivia. The gag in which America can't recognize the other countries on the map is pretty dead-on, but most of the humor in Hetalia is on the level of the other countries asking Italy "what do you think?" and Italy shouting out "PASTAAAAA!"

More than anything, reading Hetalia gives the impression of a Japanese creator retelling fading European stereotypes for a Japanese audience for whom such things are just entertainment, divorced from any context of prejudice. One gag is based on an old saying: "Heaven is when the cook is French, the officer is British, the engineer is German, the banker is Swiss and the lover is Italian. Hell is when the cook is British, the officer is German, the engineer is French, the lover is Swiss and the banker is Italian." In the end, though, even this is just a shallow gloss on the cuteness and wackiness of the characters. In true moe anthropomorphism fashion, the characters in the series are so divorced from their historical analogues that fans can make music videos about the deep OTP love between Lithuania and gay crossdresser Poland without knowing anything at all the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Hetalia is basically no more political than "It's a Small World," and there are places it won't go. While the Axis powers are the "good guys," Hirumaya scrupulously avoids any mention of anti-Semitism, swastikas or Nazism, aside from Germany's occasional complaints that he has a "crazy boss." Considering that Nazi-esque uniforms show up occasionally for fetish value even in mainstream, bestselling manga like Hisaya Nakajo's Hana-Kimi (censored in the VIZ edition; Nakajo's original comments read "I know it's bad, but I just love Nazi uniforms!"), it's a remarkable show of restraint.

It wasn't restrained enough. When a Hetalia anime was announced for January 2009, Koreans protested the show on the basis of the manga's Korea character, depicted as a sort of pest to Japan. In one scene in the manga, Korea grabs Japan's nipples; Korean protesters considered this a reference to the Japan-Korean struggle over ownership of the Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo island to Koreans, Takeshima island to Japanese). The producers of the anime countered that the Korea character wasn't included in the anime anyway, but faced by angry Internet petitions and a statement by Korean congresswoman Jeong Mi Kyeong ("I think this is a crime against Koreans…this is an illegal and insulting act"), they canceled the TV airing of the anime. The cancellation probably had little effect on profits; the anime still went on to become a hit on mobile phones and the internet. Although all the stereotypes in Hetalia were equally cheesy, the West-on-West stereotypes were cobwebby and unlikely to offend anyone, whereas the Korean stereotype brought up memories of Japanese war crimes about which Japan has been notoriously unrepentant.

Is all moe anthromorphism a trivialization of serious events? A glorification of violence for gun-happy nerds who've never experienced a real war? Is it even possible to do a meaningful cartoon representation of such vast concepts without resorting to stereotypes? One manga which might pull it off is Timaking's 2005 Afghanis-tan, a small press manga in which the countries of Central Asia are represented as little girls. Afghanis-tan, a hard-suffering farmer girl, is based on the real-life photograph of "Afghan girl" Sharbat Gula who became famous from a 1985 National Geographic cover (and whose name, incidentally – "Rose Sherbet" – already sounds like a manga character). When the story begins, Afghanis-tan is tired of being picked on by big girls Russia and Britain. She makes friends with Pakis-tan, Uzbekis-tan and her other neighbors. Some jokes are just simple cuteness: Afghanis-tan is too little to carry her AK-47 rifle, aww! But others are both dark and astute, as when little Afghanis-tan becomes enthralled with Pakisu-tan's favorite show, a mecha show called "Space Detective Tayariban." (He's a force for justice in a wartorn world, get it?) Soon all the girls in the neighborhood are arguing: "Let's play Northern Alliance!" "What are you saying? We should play Tayariban!"

For all its jokes, Afghanistan is basically a serious educational manga; it's loaded with historical info. Unlike Hetalia, it's also got something like a plot; the climax of the short manga comes when Afghanis-tan's house becomes the base of scary stray cats (Al Quaeda) and one of them bites the rich girl, Meriken, on the hand. Meriken's misguided rage wreaks havoc on the –tans, and makes Timaking's position on the Afghanistan War clear. After a three-year hiatus, in 2008 Timaking returned to geopolitical manga with Pakisu-tan.

"Come for the cuteness, stay for the historical geopolitics," might be the slogan of Afghanis-tan. Afghanis-tan manages to combine both moe and a message; and in a subtler way, so does Pixel Maritan (in fact, its pro-war, pro-U.S. message is the exact opposite of Afghanis-tan's). Pasta jokes I'm not so big on, but one thing is for sure: with the success of Hetalia, other sweeping, shallow mixtures of politics, war and marketable character design are sure to follow. The Last Temptation of Christ: The Manga, anyone?

"Invisible Manga" columnist Jason Thompson is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide, manga editor of Otaku USA magazine, and the editor of numerous manga series. His graphic novel King of RPGs comes out in January from Del Rey Manga.

The Picasso Museum in Barcelon has just launched "Secret Images," which explores Picasso's fascination with Japanese erotic art and how it influenced his paintings. The exhibit showcases 19 prints from Picasso's personal collection alongside 27 Picasso works they are believed to have inspired. One of the five rooms in the exhibit focuses on tentacles, and highlights the famed print by Edo period artist Hokusai Katsushika. Hokusai is perhaps best known for his print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, but he also delved into shunga, or erotic art. One of the most famous pieces of Japanese erotic art, Hokusai's Diving Girl with Octopus, was a particular inspiration of Picasso's and Picasso made his own version in 1903.

"Secret Images" runs through February 14th at the Picasso Museum.

Picasso's Japanese erotic inspiration on show in Barcelona [AFP via Japanator]

So now that you've seen it, what do you think? Worth creating a huge public apocalypse and humiliating poor Moon Bloodgood over? I didn't think so either.

To refresh your memory, back in February, McG made Bloodgood stand up (fully clothed) in front of a crowd of Wondercon fans and shouted, "Who wants to see Moon's boobs?" until the crowd roared. McG explained that the studio wanted to cut Bloodgood's topless scene, to keep the movie PG-13. In the roundtables afterwards, they talked up the scene and how great it was:

Afterwards, at the roundtable, McG told us he saw Moon's breasts as expressing the human softness that's what we're fighting the machines for, and they're like the opposite of the hard machine world, but on the other hand maybe it's just a gratuitous juvenile scene that drags down an otherwise serious movie, and that's what he's debating with the studio right now. And Moon herself told reporters the scene is very tasteful and she felt very comfortable with it. And the scene is about knowing you could die soon and wanting to be close to another person, without any barriers in the way. Including clothing.

Did you get all of that from the above clip? No? Then you're obviously an ingrate, who cannot appreciate the subtleties of McG's film-making process. In any case, I'm probably the last person who would object to a little gratuitious nudity or extra trashiness — especially in an already cheesy apocalyptic film, where it mixes in with the shouting and the ridiculous stunts and the nonsensical dialogue. In fact, if Christian Bale had spent the entire movie nude, it might have been the one thing that would have salvaged his performance. But especially after having seen the rest of the film, the auteur-ish temper tantrums over this brief snippet of "Moon's boobs," and the grandiose boob exegeses seem a bit overplayed. Just a tad.

We've collected 38 of the wrongest, weirdest, freakiest and most horrifying sex scenes from science-fiction and horror movies. You may want to get your ophthalmologist to put in those eye-blurring eyedrops before watching some of these. There are severed penises, severed heads, evil trees, dolls inseminating Jennifer Tilly, Satanic rituals and alien women who drain men's sexual vitality, usually killing them. Freud would get stuck in an endless feedback loop of WTF trying to figure out what these clips say about the people who made them.

Like much horror in general, a lot of these clips depict stuff that you would be, well, horrified to see happening in real life — except that in this case, it's all so absurdly campy and unreal, you mostly just question your taste in choosing to watch this stuff. However, a disclaimer does apply: if you're upset by weirdly graphic and physically impossible sex acts, a few of which involve badly choreographed violence, then don't watch these clips. We are not going to pay your therapy bills.

(Some of these clips are ones we've featured on the blog before, in the past couple years' worth of "found footage" posts.)

We already featured one dreadful oral sex moment up top, but here are several more:

And here are some clips of monster sex that may make you want to take up a vow of celibacy:

And then there are the horrendous insemination moments:

And finally, just a general collection of "holy crap WTF" moments:

Min Tan of China's Guangdong Entomological Institute recorded and carefully observed the mating habits of 60 fruit bats she captured in the wild. To her surprise, she found that, in 70 percent of the sexual encounters, the female bat would lick the shaft of her partner's penis. This makes fruit bats the only known species besides humans to engage in regular fellatio.

So why are these bats so batty for fellatio? Tan has a few theories. For one thing, sexual encounters that involved oral stimulation lasted, on average, 100 seconds longer than those that didn't, something that could be conducive to fertilization. Or the female bat could be occupying her mate for as long as possible so that a rival female doesn't snatch him away. The reasons could also be hygenic, as male bats lick their own penises after sex to clear away bacteria and fungi. Or, she could be looking for chemicals that indicate whether the male is a suitable mate, so that she knows whether to reject his sperm or look for a better partner next time around.

As an example, the researchers kindly provided a rather NSFW video that illustrates their findings, complete with frenetic mood music:

[Science Blogs]

Brain Damage: When she says he's got a real monster in his pants, she's not kidding... but it's not what she's expecting. Turns out there's a weird blue phallic alien parasite thing lurking in his drawers, and it's got an appetite for human brains. Frank Henenlotter is a disgusting man, and this is a terrifying — yet utterly ridiculous — scene.

Spermula: The Spermulites come to Earth and take over Earth women, turning them into sex maniacs who drain men's sexual vitality, mostly through oral sex. When a man has had his vitality drained by a Spermulite, he will never again be able to perform sexually, and all that's left is a wasted husk.

Erotic Nights Of The Living Dead. With a title like that, you probably know where this is going. A guy is on an island full of zombies, and he meets a sexy lady who tells him that if he unzips his pants, she will give him a thrill. And she does, just not the way he expects.

Future Kill: Speaking of which... Splatter, the mutant gang leader, is missing a very special body part. So when a mutant biker babe decides to try and give him "the best head of his life," it doesn't turn out all that well. Oh dear.

Eve Of Destruction: This hot babe is actually a nuclear-powered cyborg, and she has a thing about not liking to be called bitch." She's about to give a guy a nice blowjob when he says the B-word, but her face is already in his crotch. What to do?

Shivers: This early David Cronenberg movie features a nasty parasite that can only be spread by sexual contact, and in the end, one of the few humans who remains unaffected gets dragged into a swimming pool by the hordes of affected people... to become one of them.

Torchwood: Day One
Another sex parasite takes over hot young people in Cardiff and turns them into sex maniacs... but if you succumb to their sexual invitations, your sexual energy gets absorbed... and there's nothing left of you but a pile of dust. Eep!

They Live. There's nothing worse than when you're right in the middle of having sex with someone, and you suddenly see them for who they really are, with all their faults and shortcomings — like being an evil flayed-skin infiltrator. Ugh.

Nightmare On Elm Street 4: A guy is in bed watching MTV, when he looks over at the sexy swimsuit model poster on his wall. Then, suddenly, the swimsuit model is inside his waterbed, swimming around naked. If only the guy could join her in there. Well, thanks to Freddy Krueger... he can.

Society: Another clip we've featured before, but we have to include it for completeness. It turns out our hero's family are all aliens, and he was adopted. And his family has sex by melting into a mass of seething undifferentiated flesh. Which leads to this part where his grown-up sister's head pops out of his mother and asks if he has any Oedipal fantasies. Urk.

Grim Prairie Tales: A guy gets it on with a woman out in the great outdoors... but then she suddenly starts sucking him inside her as he screams, little by little... until there's nothing left of him. The next day, she's pregnant again. WTF???

The Outer Limits: Alyssa Milano has been taken over by an alien spore (I almost wrote "an alien sore") which compels her to have sex with lots and lots of young men... and then absorb them into herself, so there's nothing left.

Basket Case: Another crazy Frank Henenlotter picture, this time around focusing on a guy and his psychotic conjoined twin. The two of them eventually get surgically separated — but they're still psychically linked, and the twin gets more and more demented. It looks like Duane is finally going to get lucky with the girl he's been in love with for the entire film — but then it turns out his evil twin showed up instead. Urk.

Angel Heart: I'm not even sure what's happening in this Satanic moment from this classic Mickey Rourke film. They're having sex, and then there's blood everywhere, and weird people walking around, and then flames and a bondage orgy. That's just what happens if you have sex with Mickey Rourke.

Liquid Sky: Anyone who has sex with Margaret dies, because aliens are sucking up their endorphins. And eventually the aliens start vaporizing the bodies too. But Adrian bets she can have sex with Margaret and still live. Hence the immortal line, "I bet $300 I can fuck Margaret and not die."

Cemetery Man: Anna Falchi is cheating on her dead husband with Rupert Everett... when the husband suddenly climbs out of his grave, looking much the worse for wear, and bites her. Eep.

Slither: This weird feminist parable about a husband who literally tries to become his wife's whole world also features these weird penis aliens which jump into the tub while the wife is having a bath. Ewww.

Two teenagers have sex in front of all of the town's children, to propitiate an evil demon that lives in the cornfield and is busy killing Adam from Heroes. You will never be able to get the wrongness of this out of your mind, and yet it aired on the Syfy Channel in prime time.

Bride Of Chucky: Jennifer Tilly (playing herself) is making out with a hot dude, while John Waters takes photos. And then the dude gets knocked out, and it turns out that Chucky has masturbated into a cup, and the Bride of Chucky wants to inseminate Jennifer Tilly with Chucky's sperm. As the Bride says, no wonder Jennifer's career is going south.

Inseminoid: Oh man. We've featured this clip a couple times before, but it still weirds me out. An alien with a bong-shaped penis inseminates a poor woman, who's conscious for the whole thing. Seriously creepy and yet oh so tacky.

Evil Aliens: Here's another one we've featured before — a weird Whitley Streiber-headed alien has nasty sex with a poor nerd boy, while meanwhile, his female friend is being inseminated with alien babies. So freaking disturbing and just wrong.

Decoys 2: Alien Seduction: An alien transforms herself into a naughty dominatrix so she can seduce a young man and then inseminate him... for some reason, her species mates by shoving its eggs down the young man's throat. But to accomplish this, the man must be very, very turned on... and it must be below freezing, which is why she insists on doing this outdoors in winter. It. All. Makes. Sense.

The Sexorcist: Another clip we've featured before, but it's too bizarre not to include. A young artist brings home a life-size crucifix... but it comes to life, and turns into Satan! And then it inseminates her with its Satanic sperm. Oh Lord.

Demon Seed — A computer-controlled house imprisons the wife of its creator and then decides it wants to impregnate her with... wait for it... its Demon Seed. Poor Julie Christie. Another freaky, disturbing scene.

Dagon: A poor innocent woman, who's just in the wrong place at the wrong time, gets offered up to Cthulhu in this Stuart Gordon masterpiece. "We will live for eternity," the priestess says, "and so will your child."

Possession: The psychotic Anna creates a lizard creature (with tentacles) out of her monstrous id, and at one point her husband Mark walks in on her having sex with the creature, in the missionary position. "Almost," she breathes over and over again, "Almost." Until Mark finally walks out.

Species 2: Two monsters have sex in this bizarre awesome clip from Species 2, featuring the notorious "nipple tentacles" that come out of Sil's breasts.

The Entity: And then there's this weird scene where a ghost rapes Candace... It's brutal and awful, except that some special effects wizard had to spend hours figuring out how to make her breasts look as though an invisible entity was squeezing them. It actually looks quite silly and undermines the otherwise chilling and horrifying scene.

Breeders: An alien monster controls the minds of tons of female virgins, compelling them to come to its sewer lair, where they cover themselves with its nasty alien sperm. Because. Imagine how uncomfortable this scene must have been to film.

The Hills Have Eyes 2: This mutant has an incredibly long prehensile tongue... but then the heroine bites it off and kicks him in the crotch.

Masters Of Horror: Dreams In The Witch House, directed by Stuart Gordon. Who doesn't like having your back clawed during sex? Oh, wait.

Galaxy Of Terror: Another hideously disturbing clip, not for the faint of heart. The most famous worm-sex scene of all time, one which has spawned a whole new subculture online. Seriously messed up — if you didn't have a phobia of maggots, you will now.

Abducted By Daleks: And then wayyyy over on the campy side of the equation, there's this underground gem, in which the Daleks capture three women and enlist the aid of a dominatrix to try and tame them. But not even the Daleks' sex lasers seem to subdue their beautiful captives...

Evil Dead: Sam Raimi is a sick fuck. How else do you explain this scene where a tree tears a woman's clothes off and tries to have its way with her? Like a lot of these clips, it straddles the awful line between campy and unthinkably awful. Definitely not something you should watch if you're easily triggered, although it's on Youtube, weirdly enough.

Rather, this is the disgusting part: The painter gets her home, and puts her in a bathtub. The pustules rapidly spread to cover her entire body, and she convinces him to lance them for her. This causes her to act like she's climaxing (in a gore-gasm. Get it?) And then he collects the weird pus that drains out of her in a bucket, so he can use it to paint more pictures of her. Because it's Art. Don't you see?

Oh, and you shouldn't watch this clip if you're easily grossed out or offended. Really.

Later, the pustules start having worms and creatures coming out of them. It's like a metaphor. Mermaid In A Manhole is part of the Guinea Pig series of Japanese horror.

While naked women are used to infuse alien planets with exotic allure, naked men are almost always associated with dystopia. In fact, it sometimes seems like the only time we get to see naked men in science fiction is when they're in prison.

Take Twelve Monkeys, for example. Here we get a nice butt shot of Bruce Willis (looking nice and firm!), but of course it has to be in the context of a psychotic near-future dystopia where Bruce is imprisoned. We only get naked Bruce when he's forced to do it in this awful way.

Even worse is A Clockwork Orange, where we first get a glimpse of nudity when our anti-hero rapes and kills a nice lady. Then he's sent to prison and forced to strip in this weird scene. Again, an otherwise nice example of nudity (even with a bit of peen!) is only given to us in a context where we're really not in the mood to scope out Malcolm McDowell's skinny Brit boy bod.

One of the main ways that men bare their butts in science fiction, however, is a little less disturbing. Let's call it the "I'm in some kind of futuristic device and have to be naked" excuse.

That's how we get this incredibly great shot of Jeff Goldblum looking snacky in his teleportation pods from The Fly. You can almost always rely on director David Cronenberg to get a little nudity out of his male leads, which is why we love him so. (Seriously - that naked steam room knife fight scene with Viggo Mortenson in recent Cronenberg flick Eastern Promises? Wow.) Here's Goldblum:

We only get this statuesque sculptiness after Goldblum's been ripped apart at the genetic level and turned into a horrific mutant. So you get a naked guy, but unfortunately he's a proto-monster.

And then there's the best nakedness excuse ever, which is "well for some reason time travel requires you to be naked." Makes perfect sense. That's why we got to see Arnold's butt in every Terminator flick. Unfortunately, this isn't the frisky, sexy goodness you get from naked SF ladies - it's more of a menacing badass thing. Plus, naked Arnold couldn't really float anybody's boat.

Another great excuse to show a guy naked in science fiction is if you stick him in some kind of goo pod. Seriously, how many freakin movies and TV series have naked men covered in goo? I'm not kidding - it's not just Keanu in The Matrix. Here are just a few.

There's Anders in Battlestar Galactica, whose nakedness is just hinted at:

You wouldn't want to show a man without his clothes on if he wasn't somehow part of a machine or being experimented on. That there is functional nudity, not something fun to look at! And in case you wanted to gaze in adoration at this desirable boy object, forget it. He's going to be covered in some kind of industrial solvent or weird polymer that makes him look gross.

Then there's the naked homoerotic goo pod scene from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Yes, that's a goo-covered Robert DeNiro, recently reanimated in a steampunk goo tank, showing off his shapely form.

And how about the scene where Wolverine emerges from the goo, his Adamantium bones freshly installed, and rips the shit out of everything while also showing off his utterly shapely buns? Seriously, we want to see naked Wolverine but not like this! Keep his clothes on when he's fighting, and then strip him down later in a more friendly setting. But no - because Wolvie is manly, he can only be naked when he's penetrating steel walls with his mega-claws.

How often have you said to yourself that you'd like to see Russell Crowe - especially a delicious, young, version - totally naked? He has a seriously sweet bum, and now you can see it for yourself, with a little dancing action. Except of course you only get that when he's a virtual serial killer (in Virtuosity) who has managed to climb out of VR and into a nanobot android body that immediately sets to work killing everybody. Why can't we have peaceful, happy naked men in our science fiction? Couldn't he have ended that sexy little dance by doing something other than chopping off his own finger?

Well, maybe we can get a few peaceful naked men. Once we get away from the goo thing, we've got another class of male nudity in SF: The "I just got a body so I have to be naked" subgenre of bare-assery. The problem with these nudie moments? Too innocent. Nobody wants to leer at somebody who just grew a body! They're almost like kids or something. Except, of course, they really aren't.

There's nothing better than seeing bare-butted Jeff Bridges in Starman. He's come from far away and borrowed the DNA of Karen Allen's dead husband to make himself a body. Later, we actually do get to see him in sexed-up mode, but this "being born" scene gives us the full buttal deal. Forget full frontal. That just never happens.

You can also be naked if you've just regenerated, like Captain Jack did in this episode of Torchwood. Even though Jack is the sexiest guy in the universe, he only gets to give us a double bun when he's feeling completely awful and is covered in dirt. Couldn't we have gotten a little of this naked Jack in a scene with his boyfriend Ianto?

The much-missed show Kyle XY started with a fully naked moment, when the vat-grown Kyle awakens in a forest with an adult body and the brain of a computer. There's something so sweet and innocent and utterly hot about this moment.

When men aren't birthing themselves into nudity, they use nakedness as a way of showing their true selves and scaring the crap out of people. That's one way to read this bizarre and sad sequence in cult film The Man Who Fell To Earth, featuring David Bowie as an alien who has been hiding among humans. At last, he decides to show his girlfriend his true (naked) self - intercut with his memories of having sex back on his homeworld.

When Dr. Manhattan has sex with Silk Spectre in Watchmen, the whole thing quickly devolves into something creepy. Even though we get to see lots of glowing nakedness, and even get a few CGI penis glimpses, the body of Dr. Manhattan is anything but erotic.

So you can tell I'm pretty critical of male nudity as it stands in science fiction. Are there any examples of good, friendly nudity that isn't about deathtripping and mad science?

We got good eye candy on Star Trek Enterprise when it turned out that nudity is required in the decontamination chamber. This is what I'm talking about, people. Even though sadly there is underwear involved, this is a perfect example of male nudity reaching the gratuitous, just-there-to-be-looked-at-ness of female nudity in science fiction. No killing, no scary vats of goo, no "innocent newborn" crap. Just good, old-fashioned erotic nudity purely to make you feel tingly.

Wouldn't you know that Charlton Heston got there first with this whole frisky, friendly version of male nudity? The gun-lover's first-ever nude scene was in science fiction classic Planet of the Apes. He and his astronaut pals decide (totally randomly) to take a naked dip in the water. Why is this scene here? For the same reason all those nude scenes with ladies are there in every other movie. Just so we can take a nice break and check out old CH's sculpted buns.

My point, other than to share pictures of naked men with you on a Friday night, is that something is wrong with the way science fiction deals with male bodies. Male beauty is always being undermined by violence, defaced with goo, or attenuated by its association with birthing. I'm not saying it's wrong to show men engaged in action, or in ugly situations. But I do think it's odd that lovely male bodies are almost always put on display in contexts where we are made to feel uncomfortable or upset by seeing them.

There's something almost schizophrenic about male nudity in science fiction. We see glimpses of men's allure, only to have it erased. It's as if these scenes are titillating you, only to slap you in the face.

As somebody who appreciates the male form, I'd like to be given a few more options in my science fiction, please. Nudity should not have to end (or begin) in tragedy.

1982's Android is a truly wretched movie, but it does have some hliarious android-sex-related scenes. It's all about female sexuality and the ways in which men try to own it or control it — but luckily, it uses androids to explore that theme. Maggie, a fugitive from the law, arrives on a space station where an evil professor is experimenting with androids. The professor (Klaus Kinski!!) has already created Max, the sex-starved male android. But now he's created a lovely female android, and he just needs a woman's sexual energy to make the female android come to life. At least, that's what I took away from this movie's somewhat kinked storyline. Here's the scene where the professor tries to convince Maggie to charge up his android with sex (it comes before the clip above):

So yay, the female android, Cassandra, is finally activated and "fully functional." And the professor decides to take his new sexbot for a spin. Sadly, it doesn't turn out that well... This last clip is definitely NSFW:

Oh, and Maggie brings two rough-and-tumble male convicts with her, and they share some fantastic dialogue, like this exchange:

"You remind me of the Red Queen, Mendes. The faster you go —"
"Don't be talkin' about queens to me, punk! I'll take you right here!"

More images are available at My Zombie Pin-Up, where the 2010 calendar is on sale for $19.99.

[via ShockTillYouDrop]

"What a hideous and polluted land I have come to unawares!"
-the Shinto deity Izanagi upon viewing the Underworld, as quoted by Ian Buruma in Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (1985)

On October 7, Joe Holloway, a 53-year-old County Councilman from Wicomico County, Maryland, displayed photocopies from Akira Toriyama's martial arts comedy manga Dragon Ball before his shocked fellow council members. On display were topless girls, jokes about dirty old men and girls' panties, crotch-patting, and a naked monkey-tailed boy with a Maurice Sendak-esque baby penis-this in a book rated "for teens aged 13 and up." The mother of a 9-year-old child had found the manga in the school library and alerted Holloway, who went to the council rather than contacting the school board. "The drawings and story lines are disgusting," Holloway, a Republican grandfather, said. Although some county and state library officials spoke out in favor of graphic novels and parental responsibility, the book was quickly pulled from the school library. The blog Delmarva Dealings ran the post title "Wicomico Schools Peddle Smut to Children."

In response, Greg Latshaw, a journalist for the Del Marva Daily Times, made the brilliant observation that "The book, 'Dragon Ball Volume 1: The Monkey King,' is laid out like a comic book." The word "manga" doesn't even appear in Latshaw's article, nor does this summer's already-forgotten bomb of a Hollywood film adaptation Dragonball Evolution (which excised the panty jokes anyway).

Despite its recent rise in popularity, manga, like most pop culture in the kaleidoscopic media landscape, is invisible if you don't know to look for it. The fact that it's published right to left, in keeping with the original Japanese format, surely deflects the eyes of a percentage of nosy parents who might otherwise figure out what their kids are reading. Manga is just the Japanese word for "comics," one of the many forms of graphic novels. But to serious fans, manga is a language of its own, a private space.

Created for Japanese readers, manga exhibits different "community standards" from those in America. In manga, it's perfectly fine for a villain to chain the hero to a cross in a kid's show; and it's common to see lots of bare breasts in a teenage boys' comedy like Negima! or Tenchi Muyo!. Aware of these cultural differences (which are often censored in American editions), many manga fans defended Dragon Ball's right to mix nudity with martial arts scenes. "Every single example you can pull out of the DragonBall series for 'offensive material'…are childish mockeries of offensiveness," said a commenter on Anime News Network." "Nudity does not mean pornography, and Dragon Ball is strictly 'naked people are funny'," said another. Other Anime News Network commenters, however, pointed out that Dragon Ball is labeled "for ages 13 and up" and shouldn't have been in an elementary/middle school library anyway (though the fact that it was also pulled from the local public library was more troubling).

Meanwhile, just a few days before the Wicomico story broke, another battle was being waged across the mangasphere. When Yen Press announced their plans to publish the Japanese wolf-spirit fantasy novel Spice and Wolf with a paranormal romance photo-cover rather than the original big-eyed manga-style cover, fans exploded with outrage. The light novel blog Ranobe Cafe was fairly even-handed about the new cover itself, but closed with an urgent request that Yen Press retain the English subtitle from the Japanese edition, "Merchant Meats Spicy Wolf." ("This tagline is IMPORTANT. The author has admitted that the tagline's mispelling (sp.) of "Meets" to "Meats" is eluding (sp.) to something not yet shown in the story.")

The complaints about the cover itself, however, had a common thread of surprising prudishness. Here are just a few comments posted by fans:

"I find this cover prurient and distasteful." "This is absolutely horrible, you are trying to GAIN customers by putting a blurry nude woman on the cover?" "It's too erotic." "I think it's shameful that you feel you have to resort to a cheap tactic like nudity to sell this book." "Low class person who enjoys reading trashy romance novels…filthy American adult novel…Twilight fans and sleazy romance novel fans…cheap erotic novel…trashy romance novel…trashy sex-romance novels…degrading…"

Never mind that the heroine of Spice and Wolf does, in fact, appear naked for much of the first volume, and that one nude scene is even illustrated in the Japanese edition. Regardless of the trashiness of the cover, the message was clear: People felt the Americanized version of sexuality was disgusting and crass, and considered the original Japanese sexuality subtle and delicate. It's the kind of "fetishizing the Japanese" sentiment that could have been expressed 120 years ago by European visitors to Japan talking about geisha and gathering artifacts japonais.

As much as American manga publishers might deny it, one of manga's big appeals to Americans is not its "high quality" but the fact that it is Japanese, and has a Japanese sensibility. There are incredible manga in many genres, such as cooking manga (Oishinbo and Iron Wok Jan), football manga (Eyeshield 21), and manga about lovesick alien ovaries (Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu), but America's current #1 manga, Naruto, is a ninja story. Naruto, whose highly realistic artwork is actually very Western-influenced (by way of Katsuhiro Otomo), offers Americans the thrill of Japaneseness without challenging them too much.

For hardcore manga fans, though, Naruto and Dragon Ball are already too Westernized. In the classic 1991 anime Otaku no Video, proselytizing anime fans overcome the haters, take over the world and sail off on a spaceship into the stars, but most manga and anime fans are more like the ones in the 2002 manga Genshiken: perfectly happy in their private fandom but not so eager to spread the message. The easy availability of scanlations (online bootleg translations of manga) makes it even easier for hardcore fans to self-marginalize by removing any economic weight from their opinions. CMX's censored edition of the martial arts manga Tenjho Tenge in 2005 infuriated hardcore fans, but those were the ones most likely to just read the scanlations anyway. If you look around, you can find free scanlations of almost any popular manga online. By the 2000s, manga and anime fandom had entered the age of the hikikomori (shut-in), becoming increasingly withdrawn and insular, obsessed with fetishes like cat ears and maid uniforms.

When the alternative is Dragonball Evolution, who can blame hardcore fans for refusing to assimilate? The truth is that I, too, am guilty of Orientalism; I think manga are objectively some of the best comics on Earth, but I also read it for the weird, the extreme, the sincere craziness which you can't find in American young adult comics and fiction.

As Naruto and Bleach creep into the mainstream, the truly hardcore fans are the ones who keep manga disrespectable-the female fans reading yaoi guy-on-guy pornography, the (shudder) guys who play galge (girl games, aka dating simulations), the retro freaks reading "gar" macho-man manga of the kind that stopped being popular with Fist of the North Star in the 1980s. I'm not suggesting we embrace everything thoughtlessly; I wouldn't want Americans to become comfortable with the ways some manga artists draw black characters, just as I wouldn't want the sexual harassment in manga, including Dragon Ball, to become assimilated into an anti-feminist backlash by clueless weeaboos. (A college-age fan once explained to me at length how the breast size jokes in Slayers weren't sexist because "She's flat-chested, but she's the heroine! It shows that a heroine can be flat-chested!") On the other hand, I love the disrespectful Japanese attitude towards Western religion, I love the violence, I love the imagination, I love the sincerity.

Perhaps the sincerity most of all. Manga can be funny and cynical as hell-look at Excel Saga-but there is something refreshing about most manga's earnest attitude, its lack of hipster irony. It makes for great stories. (Sadly, it also attracts fans who have no sense of irony about things like changing the cover of Spice and Wolf.) At this moment, while manga is engaged in a battle between mainstreaming and marginalization, it's worth mentioning that manga publisher VIZ's very same Dragon Ball was censored once before, in 1999, after parental complaints led to it being pulled from Toys 'R Us. The result satisfied no one-parents still complained about the semi-dirty jokes which remained in the censored edition-and VIZ went back to the uncensored edition a few years later. It was the uncensored edition which Joe Holloway called "disgusting."

But when teenagers smoking cigarettes is enough to get popular weekly boys' manga SHONEN JUMP magazine pulled by retailers, despite an "ages 13 and up" label, how can you win? In American culture, where you can't show the briefest nudity in less than an R-rated movie, the really surprising-and encouraging-thing about the Dragon Ball incident is that this kind of thing doesn't happen more often. I would love for manga to become more popular, but I also embrace its sub-cult nature. Long live the invisible manga, the manga that gets overlooked because it's not about ninja or fox-eared girls. Long live manga that doesn't pass through American cultural filters. Long live filth.

"Invisible Manga" columnist Jason Thompson is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide, manga editor of Otaku USA magazine, and the editor of numerous manga series. His graphic novel King of RPGs comes out in January from Del Rey Manga.

Savage comes back with a resounding "Ick" and "No:"

As for the morality of the situation, fucking zombies - the walking dead - is necrophilia, technically speaking, but practically speaking, it comes closer to bestiality. A human being who has been zombified is nothing but an animal, hungry for brains, incapable of thought much less consent. We can kill animals for their flesh, but we mustn't fuck them, HIZZIE; and we can kill zombies for wanting our flesh, but likewise we mustn't fuck them.

Plus, as we noted in last year's piece on zombie feminism, the molested dead have a habit of striking back.

Savage Love (NSFW) [Nerve]