A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Stuart Gordon's Films

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"Horror and sex go hand in hand. I think that the two are life and death." —Stuart Gordon

We've lost a lot of legends in 2020, but one whose death got unfairly swept under the radar was director and H.P. Lovecraft-adaptor extraordinaire Stuart Gordon. Itmight have beenthe timing, coming as it did in late March in the midst of a global pandemic andit not being COVID-related, it's a damn shame that his death was treated as just another news story. With October finally here and everyone getting in the spirit of the season, we're once again shining a spotlight on five horror film directors who made great films with great sex and nudity, and who better to honor than the late, great Stuart Gordon?

The Chicago native, who left us on March 24 at the age of 72, was a singular filmmaker even within the already auteur-driven world of horror.You can spot a Stuart Gordon film pretty easily once you've seen about three of them and his influence is being felt in the world of guerrilla indie horror to this very day. Gordon was in his late-30s when he began his film career in earnest, but he was active in the Chicago theatre scene throughout the 70s and early 80s, working with such Chicago theatre luminaries as David Mamet, Joe Mantegna, and Dennis Franz.

Gordon always kept one toe in the theatre world, however, returning to it in the twilight of his career with stage adaptations of, appropriately enough, Edgar Allen Poe, starring Re-Animator's Jeffrey Combs. Gordon would then turnRe-Animator itself into a musical and in 2017, he revised—but sadly didn't direct—his 1977 stage adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan. Theatre seemed to be where Gordon's heart always lay, but cinema allowed him to flex other muscles that theatre just didn't allow, namely his love of Lovecraft. In the early 80s, Gordon headed to California tomake it in the pictures with a dream to do something different than he'd seen on screen prior.

Before we get going, onequick fun fact about Stuart Gordon and any potential influence he may have had on your childhood, he and longtime friend and collaborator Brian Yuzna are responsible for 1989's Disney smash hit Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Gordon and Yuzna, along with writer Ed Naha, were the primary creators of that idea, which honestly sounds like a Stuart Gordon movie if you remove the kid-friendly elements and just boil it down to the elevator pitch: Mad scientist shrinks his own children, who now face countless dangers from a world in which they're the size of ants. Kinda makes you wish the Disney film wasn't so beloved at this point.

Gordon arrived in Hollywood a fully formed filmmaker with a vision, and as we're starting at the beginning of Gordon's film career, you'll see that perversions of sex and nudity werecrucial to this visionfrom the very beginning. His first film contains probably the most memorable and talked-about nude scene of his career, a feat that would prove difficult to top, though obviously not impossible. Like any well-liked and respected director, Gordon cultivated a stock company over the years, so you'll see the same names and faces—and yes, boobies—popping up multiple times, starting with...

Re-Animator (1985)

I wrote extensively about this flick last October inAnatomy of a Nude Scenebut below you'll find the first few paragraphs of that article. Click here to read the rest of the column, including a tragic story about Barbara Crampton's nude scene contributing to the downfall of a marriage...

Based on the H.P. Lovecraft short story "Herbert West—Reanimator," Stuart Gordon set out to make a modern-day Frankenstein tale that was more in line with the current, more gory, more no-holds-barred style of horror that was now pervasive in the mid-80s thanks to the emergence of home video. The film underwent a number of changes and edits thanks to securing an X-rating on its first three submissions to the MPAA. Convinced that he couldn't maintain the film's integrityandachieve the less restrictive rating, Gordon eventually made two cuts of the film. One unrated with his original vision intact and an R-rated version for home video release that cut most of the gore and added in scenes deleted from the original cut.

Gordon cast a then mostly unknown character actor by the name of Jeffrey Combs to play the lead character, a medical student who has created a "reagent" to reanimate dead bodies. After the death and reanimation of his mentor Hans Gruber (this movie predatesDie Hardby 3 years), Westmust relocatefromSwitzerland to New England in order to continue his studies. He moves into the home of another med student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott)—who is covertlyengaged to Megan (Barbara Crampton), daughter of the school's dean—and West soon comes into conflict with Dr. Hill (David Gale), a former colleague of Dr. Gruber.

West starts slowly at his new school, bringing Dan's dead cat back to life before eventually moving on to humans. Through a convoluted series of events, West ends up decapitating Dr. Hill and then separately re-animating his head and body. Hill absconds with West's reagent and uses it to revive the dead dean, whom he then uses to kidnap Megan. He holds her hostage, knowing that West and Cain will soon come looking for him, but in the meantime, Hill gets a little frisky at the sight of Megan and decides to use her dead father to strip her nude on a table in a morgue.

Unable to contain his lust, Hill's body picks up his head and holds it so that he can kiss her all over before heading south to yodel in her canyon, so to speak, all while the reanimated corpse of her father looks on. West and Cain burst through the door before he can actually do anything...

From Beyond (1986)

Following the modest box office success ofRe-Animator, despite its X-rating, Gordon decided to go back to the Lovecraft well for this tale of a scientist battling inter-dimensional beings that want to assimilate our world. Thanks to his days of working in theatre and assembling a stock company of actors, both Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton returned for this flick, as well as Stuart's wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, along with virtually the entire creative team behind the camera. Gordon also boosted hisgenre bonafides by addingDawn of the Dead's Ken Foree into the mix.

Combs gets to play the hero who gets the girl this time around, instead of the outsider to a trio, as Dr. Crawford Tillinghast, assistant toendocrinologist and (secret, at the beginning anyway) madman Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel). The not-so-good doctor has discovered something involving the manipulation of the pineal gland leading to expanding the conscience into other dimensions. It's all great set-up but it's a bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo being expertly delivered by two excellent character actors, so you always tend to go with the flow. Kind of like a Christopher Nolan movie.

You guys are never gonna believe this, but Barbara Crampton somehow finds herself nude at the mercy of a creature once again, this time as the evil Dr. Pretorius attempts to take her to the other dimension and her dress rips open, exposing her breasts...

Thankfully Bubba (Ken Foree) and Crawford are able to stop this from happening. Later when she tries to get something going with Crawford while he lays in bed, she eventually turns to Bubba to scratch that itch, giving us a rare lip slip in her leather lingerie...

Robot Jox (1990),Fortress (1993)Space Truckers (1997)

For our purposes, I'm lumping these together because they're light on skin. Gordon's short-lived hardcore sci-fi period began with 1990's Robot Jox and runs through both of these films. Robot Joxlanded a PG rating in the US, so the only nudity comes courtesy of female lead Anne-Marie Johnson, who bares her behind whileheading into the showernude...

Fortress was a Christopher Lambert vehiclefor which Gordon was basically a hired gun director. It's one of onlyfour films he directed that he didn't also at least write and/or produce, and the other three all seem like obvious Gordon-type movies. This one feels like he got the job off the strength ofRobot Joxto direct a mid-budget Australian sci-fi flick.

It's not a bad movie by any stretch, but nothing especially Stuart Gordon about it. There's a nice brief look at Loryn Locklin's buns when she straddles Lambert in bed...

Space Truckers is an absolutely insane film that should be seen to be believed, with a title as one the nose as Snakes on a Plane or 8 Heads in a Duffle Bag. It's pure Stuart Gordon demented fun with Dennis Hopper playing John Canyon, one of the titular long haulers only with a much longer leash than most directorshad given him in a long time. Noted Italian actor Stephen Dorff plays his protégé,Mike Pucci, while Debi Mazar is Cindy, the waitress who promised to marry Canyon in exchange for passage back to Earth.

Cindy is abducted by the villainous half-man/half-cyborg Nabel (Charles Dance, having a ton of hammy fun) and we get some quick peeks at Mazar's left peak thanksto anill-fitting bikini top given to her by Nabel...

Again, it's pure exploitation fun with George Wendt also along for the ride. Check it out for sure, Fortress for completists only. Moving on...

Dagon (2001)

Gordon returned to the sweet and tentacledarms of Lovecraft for this 2001 film that takes its title from a 1919 short story, but its plot from Lovecraft's 1931 novella "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," whilesimultaneously retaining elements of its namesake short story. In order to secure financing, Gordon shot in Spain using Spanish money, with a distribution deal that would only ever see the film get theatrical release in, you guessed it, Spain. The film is certainly better than its direct-to-video reputation may suggest, though it is also very obviously the product of compromise.

Ezra Godden, who shot this before his breakout role in Band of Brothers, stars as Paul, a man who washes up on the shore of the small Spanish fishing village of Imboca (a Spanish variation onInnsmouth) along with his girlfriend Bárbara (Raquel Meroño) following a shipwreck.Unfortunately for Paul, this town worships an ancient sea deity called Dagon and although the locals have more or less gotten used to it at this point, outsiders often find themselves running for their lives. Paul finds himself having haunting dreams of a topless mermaid (Macarena Gómez) who turns out to be a real woman from the village named Uxía...

She will prove to be a key ally in Paul's journey to defeat Dagon, but unfortunately Bárbara won't as she finds herself on the wrong end of getting impregnated by Dagon in the third act...

It's certainly not Gordon's best film and easily the weakest of his Lovecraft trilogy, but it does have its charms, particularly considering how low the budget must have been. It never got a theatrical release in North America, coming straight to DVD in early 2002, another casualty of its Spanish financing agreement.

King of the Ants (2003)

For our purposes, I think there are two things to talk about in this 2003 flick. First, it was the very first film ever produced by notorious schlock-house The Asylum, and second, it was the first nude appearance of B-movie legend Kari Wuhrer after having her breast implants removed...

Edmond (2005)Stuck (2007)

We close our discussion with Gordon's final two theatrically released feature films. In 2005, he reunited with his old Chicago theatre pal David Mamet to turnMamet's play Edmond into a feature film. When a fortune teller informs our titular mopey businessman in a rumpled suit (William H. Macy) that he's not where he belongs, he sets off into the New York City night to find out where he belongs. Like any other Mamet vehicle with William H. Macy in the lead, you can imagine it goes to some pretty dark places.

This makes Gordon a qualified, if not completely obvious, partner for this journey into the dark heart of the American male. His odyssey takes him to apeep showwhere he embarrassingly runs out of money to complete his quest for, you know, fulfillment while Bai Ling spreads her legs for him...

Mena Suvari plays a small but pivotal role as a prostitute in this film, but she was front and center for Gordon's final film, 2007's Stuck. Based on a true story of a woman in Texas in 2001 who crashed her car into a homeless man who then became lodged in her windshield. She returned home and parked in her garage with the man, still alive, stuck in her windshield. In the film's scenario, Mena Suvari is the woman and Stephen Rea the trapped man.

The film's pitch black comedy comes from the fact that Suvari's character attempts to go about her life as normal,oblivious to the fact that Rea is dying in her car in her garage. This includes having sex with her boyfriend in a TA-baring sex scene...

And later kicking the stuffing out of a nude Sharlene Royer when she catches her and her man in bedtogether...

It's a shame Gordon never made another film, but it's fitting that he went out on a film so perfectly pitched in that area between horror and comedy. It's where he thrived and did his best work. He will be missed, not just by the horror community, for his contributions not only to the genre, but to the form.

Further reading on the work of Stuart Gordon here on Mr. Skin

—A SKIN-depth Look at Full Moon Entertainmentfeatures a discussion of 1990's Pit and the Pendulum and 1995's Castle Freak

—Anatomy of a Nude Scene: Barbara Crampton Gets Head from a Severed Head in Re-Animator

—A SKINterview with Stuart Gordon from 2009

Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series