20 Most Cringeworthy Star Trek Film Moments

11. Naked Uhura Dancing - Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Uhura DancingParamount PicturesThe story goes that during a planning meeting, screenwriter David Loughery suggested having Uhura dance naked to distract Sybok's minions on Nimbus III - as a joke. He was thus just as surprised (and maybe horrified) as the rest of us when the producers told him it was a good idea. This shows the level of careful planning that went into most of this movie. Now, Nichelle Nichols is an attractive woman, probably, and most heterosexual Star Trek fans of a particular age would have given their eye teeth to see the Classic Series version of Uhura doing a fan dance naked (or mostly naked). Those same fans most likely would prefer to scratch their eyes out than watch Nichelle Nichols (who was 57 at the time) performing that same dance in 1989. It's as if, instead of walking in on your grandparents engaging in sweater action on the sofa, you instead walked in on your grandmother trying on the outfit she wore back in the 50s when she was a pole dancer. It's not sexy enough to warrant its inclusion here, and to say it's included for comedic purposes is to be even more unfair to Ms. Nichols than we have been here. There are plenty - and we mean plenty - of other moments in this movie that deserve Honorable Mentions: Kirk's fight with the Feline Fury; the "Be one with the horse" line; the "comedic" scene with Sulu and Chekov; the fact that the Big Three use rocket boots to shoot upward to a deck on the ship that doesn't exist...This much cringing can hurt your neck, so it's best just to move on to the next movie - which, sadly, has its own share of this sort of thing...
Contributor
Contributor

Tony Whitt has previously written TV, DVD, and comic reviews for CINESCAPE, NOW PLAYING, and iF MAGAZINE. His weekly COMICSCAPE columns from the early 2000s can still be found archived on Mania.com. He has also written a book of gay-themed short stories titled CRESCENT CITY CONNECTIONS, available on Amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle format. Whitt currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.