Pia Zadora naked in Butterfly (1982)

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After having worked as a child star in a film universally acknowledged to be one of the worst ever made (Santa Claus Conquers the Martians), Pia Zadora disappeared for a couple of decades. When she returned to Hollywood, she soon built a reputation as the ultimate 1980s bimbo. People said that she not only looked like a bim, but she couldn’t act worth beans, and she eventually ended up winning a special Razzie as “worst actress of the decade.” To be honest, it was amazing that people still remembered her when the decade was over. By the time of the election which summarized the decade for the Razzie folks, Pia had virtually disappeared from the public eye. She was able to achieve the notoriety of being the decade’s worst actress based on nothing more than two obscure stinkers made early in the decade: Butterfly (1982) and The Lonely Lady (1983).

Zadora’s appeal, if that is the correct word, was her uncanny facial resemblance to a very young teen, despite the fact that she was nearly thirty when she made those two films. You know how it is with guys and young girls. Moreover, Zadora combined her little girl face with a lost puppy neediness and a very impressive womanly body. Put her in a Catholic prep school uniform, and she would have become the richest woman in Japan. Blessed with a decent set of pipes, she also could have become a Broadway-style singer, but for some reason she chose to be an actress instead, and she just never seemed to have the chops for that profession, or so went the conventional wisdom. During and after those two films, she became one of Johnny Carson’s instant punch lines, and eventually her entire career seemed to consist of playing herself in skits and spoofs.

I agree with the contemporary reviewers that The Lonely Lady was a genuinely awful movie (my review), and Pia was awful in it. The verdict of history seems to concur. The Lonely Lady actually gives Santa Claus Conquers the Martian a good battle for the dishonor of being the all-time worst Pia Zadora movie in the IMDb ratings. That is an amazing achievement, considering that Santa is one of the worst of all time!

The Lonely Lady destroyed any hope Pia may have had to become a respected actress. The film was nominated for eleven Razzie awards and won six, including all the important ones. Pia, of course, won the “Worst Actress” trophy.

Butterfly also won her a Worst Actress Razzie, but that movie is a whole different kettle of crawdads. It also won her some legitimate positive awards. They loved her at Cannes, and Rex Reed praised Butterfly as if it were the second coming of Battleship Potemkin. Pia was not only nominated for the Golden Globe for Best New Star of the Year in a Motion Picture, but she won the award, and she didn’t beat a bunch of nobodies, either. She beat out one of the greatest film debuts in history – Kathleen Turner in Body Heat!! Think about that. The 1982 voters had to choose the hottest newcomer and took Pia Zadora in Butterfly over Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. Pia may have become a universal punch line by 1983, but it is obvious that not everyone thought she sucked in 1982. (In fairness, there have always been rumors that the Golden Globes election was fixed by Zadora’s rich husband.)

Butterfly is not a great movie, but Zadora’s limitations were at least partially offset by the fact that she was cast perfectly as a Lolita character. Stacy Keach plays a lonely hermit of a miner assigned to guard an abandoned mine out in the desert. Zadora shows up on his doorstep one day, claiming to be his long-lost daughter. She’s not exactly the pigtails-and-Barbies kind of daughter. She soon proceeds to show him her naughty bits every chance she gets, and does her best to seduce him. At one point Keach is actually bathing a naked Zadora, scrubbing her breasts, before he finally pulls back and declares, “This ain’t right.” You have to admire his resolve in that scene, since Keach had been without a woman for a long time, and ripe li’l Zadora was definitely offering the ol’ miner a chance to strike the daughterlode. A minor for a miner.

The atmosphere of the film can best be described as “sweat and saxophones” – pretty much what you’d expect from a script based on a steamy James M. Cain story. Unfortunately, Stacy Keach never seemed to get into the rhythm of the film and seemed oblivious to the script’s inherent potential for entertaining over-the-top sleaze. He approached the entire project as seriously and professionally as if he were performing Henry V at the Old Vic, or even Vic V and the Old Henry. The supporting cast, however, cheesed it up. Burl Ives couldn’t make his customary Southern Gothic appearance as the sweaty, fat authority figure in a Colonel Sanders suit, but Orson Welles filled in for him, and a host of B-list celebs dropped in from time to time, including Stewart Whitman, James Franciscus, “and me, I’m Ed McMahon.”

The last name is the key to Zadora’s infamy. It was McMahon’s presence in this film which eventually turned Pia into a standing joke. Carson loved to ride his sidekick, and this project provided ideal grist for Johnny’s joke mill. Without McMahon in the cast, Zadora might have simply faded into obscurity like so many other wannabes, but Ed’s presence in Butterfly guaranteed Johnny’s eternal vigilance, and Johnny did as much as anyone in the world to shape the public’s opinions about popular culture.

To tell you the truth, the entire movie is raunchy and melodramatic, but it is much better than the judgment of history and the IMDb voters. The plot is just your typical potboiler, but the film has a lot of positives. Cain is the guy who wrote Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, so his work had both the competence and the sleaziness to provide an ideal vehicle for Pia, and the premise of Butterfly seemed to fit her like a custom-tailored suit. The cinematography captures the isolation and stark beauty of the desert quite effectively, and the score was written by screen legend Ennio Morricone, who has written some of the greatest scores in screen history. (Once Upon a Time in America; The Good The Bad and the Ugly; Days of Heaven, Malena, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, The Legend of 1900; and about 400 more! That’s a not a misprint. He has about 500 musical composition credits at IMDb.)

All that plus Ed McMahon! And Orson Welles! How can you not be interested? You may well find this film highly entertaining in an operatic kind of way. I do.

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Unfortunately, there is surprisingly little nudity for such a raunchy story. The one really good frame, the last one below, is totally out of focus.


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Dakota Johnson naked in Verity (2026)

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Old-fashioned trashy thriller, in the manner of Brian de Palma.

Adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel, this seductive, psychological thriller follows renowned author Verity Crawford and Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), a struggling writer who relocates to the remote Crawford estate to ghostwrite for Verity. After Lowen uncovers what appears to be Verity’s chilling autobiographical notes, she wrestles with the disturbing and twisted confessions about Verity’s husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), and finds it hard to separate fiction from reality, manipulation from attraction, and opportunity from obsession.

IMDb: 6.1
Tomato Meter: 41%

Lowen Ashleigh, hired to ghostwrite for Verity Crawford, uncovers what appears to be Verity’s autobiographical notes. She wrestles with the confessions about Verity’s husband and finds separating fiction from reality challenging

These captures come from a CAM


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Florence Pugh naked in episode 2 of East of Eden

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New on Netflix today in seven parts, this American mini-series is the latest interpretation of the noted Steinbeck novel.

Steinbeck originally addressed the novel to his young sons, Thom and John (then 6 1⁄2 and 4 1⁄2 years old, respectively). Steinbeck wanted to describe the sights, sounds, smells, and colors of the Salinas Valley for them in detail.

Given that The Salinas Valley is such a powerful presence in the book, I doubt that Steinbeck would approve of filming the story anywhere else, but this series was filmed in New Zealand!

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There is additional nudity in later episodes as well. More from this series.

I don’t think I have ever read any of Steinbeck’s books voluntarily, but as a baby boomer who went to a prep school and then majored in literature, I found him inevitable. I must have read a shitload of his books for classes: Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, The Grapes of Wrath, Travels With Charlie, etc. I have not read East of Eden because it was never required, and because I am no fan of magna opera. To be candid, I have never even made it all the way through the James Dean film, although I have probably watched the entire film if one adds together all the snippets in all the years.

I never found Steinbeck much better than competent as a wordsmith. He was not a graceful stylist like Thomas Wolfe or a daring innovator like Faulker. But if he had written like them, he would have destroyed the simple sincerity of his gritty, working-class tales. He was a voice for the downtrodden and an articulate critic of the abuses of capitalism in the depression years, and as such, his work from the 30s tends to exalt him as a spokesman for a generation of ordinary Americans, making him a sort of guitar-free version of Woody Guthrie.

I think it was Steinbeck who first taught me about the harsh realities of capitalism, and shook me out of the innocence of childhood. The passage below is from The Grapes of Wrath. Its simple, direct eloquence moved me and awakened my social consciousness when I was a young teen. I remember being horrified by a reality I had never imagined in my Howdy Doody childhood, and thinking that there was something deeply wrong with any system that allows some men to engage in the wanton destruction of food while their countrymen are starving.

“The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit — and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate — died of malnutrition — because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

I asked my parents whether that really happened, whereupon they just shrugged their shoulders with heavy resignation, for they had chosen to ignore the parts of that time that they preferred to forget. In my experience, the people of The Greatest Generation had a very selective memory of their youth, choosing to bathe it all in the glow of hardships survived, a common enemy vanquished, and a better world passed on to posterity. They generally preferred to recall their victories rather than to chronicle the ugly specifics of the deprivation they endured, the enemies they faced, or the ideologies they may have embraced during desperate times. So perhaps Steinbeck deserved that Nobel Prize for passing on to subsequent generations a sense of the outrage that people felt in real time, and helping those of us born into cozy post-war prosperity to understand – viscerally – the sort of world our parents and grandparents had endured and, if among the fortunate, had survived.

Hina Kagei topless in the premiere episode of Plastic Beauty

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Japanese series now on Netflix.

When a surgeon shifts to aesthetics and clashes with a celebrity doctor, she discovers the complex pressures behind the pursuit of physical perfection. In the first episode, she saves a young influencer’s life by removing a dangerous silicone implant, thus sabotaging the young woman’s career. This sparks a firestorm.

Hina’s topless scenes mostly involve prosthetics.


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In this case, we see one of her real breasts and one prosthetic overlay.


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