10 Best Anti-Valentine's Day Movies

The erotic thriller genre was a serious cash cow by the mid-1990s. Whilst such 1980s hits as 9½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction helped pave the way, it was 1992's Basic Instinct that really blew the doors wide open. From that point on, nothing was hotter in Hollywood than a sexed-up murder mystery which required its stars to be naked a lot.

Of course, the more these increasingly absurd and overblown films flounced their alleged eroticism, the more ridiculous and flagrantly un-sexy they became, until the one-two punch of Striptease and Showgirls pretty much killed the format off at the multiplexes.

However, the writing was already on the wall with 1993's Body of Evidence, the first major attempt to out-sleaze Basic Instinct, which cast Madonna (alarm bells are ringing already) as a femme fatale charged with the murder of her lover (an older and wealthier man, obviously) after he died during intercourse with her.

Willem Defoe plays the lawyer assigned to her defence, who naturally breaks every rule in the book by entering into an affair with his client. Things quickly get kinky, most notoriously in a moment when she ties him down and pours hot candle wax on his exposed bits-and-bobs.

The old maxim 'less is more' is proven correct in a roundabout way here, as the harder Body of Evidence tries to be shocking and saucy, the more tedious it becomes; all of which makes it the best/worst 'erotic' movie for Anti-Valentine's viewing.

(Plus, you just know that somewhere a young EL James was watching and taking notes, and if that's not cause to condemn the film I don't know what is... )