I watched Blue Velvet again last night. It's been awhile. I was reminded of just how shocking Isabella Rossellini's nude scene (when Dorthey appears on Jeffery's porch) is. It's just horrifying when the two worlds of the film collide this way (that perfect suburban life and the darkness on the edge of town, so to speak)

What were nude scenes that shocked you either because of the content or the actor/actress who appeared in it. I'm not talking about just sex scenes (though some of them could certainly be described as shocking), but nude scenes in cinema in general.
Why was it shocking for you?

Of course, to not get this thread locked, no pics kinda' goes without saying.

Julie Andrews... I mean the most prim and proper Mary fucking Poppins bared her titties for her husband Blake Edwards. I doubt anyone even remembers his film S.O.B. I sure don't.

Yup, when I was writing the line about "actors and actresses", Julie Andrews was the first name that came to mind.

Gotta be Tanya Roberts in the PG-rated "Sheena" for me. Totally unexpected when I was a kid watching it at the drive-in with my parents. Puberty unlocked! LOL

Basic Instinct

Recently, as in less than two weeks:

Emma Thompson (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande)

Wowzahs!

I don't know if I should bring up Pretty Baby.

Too late, I just did.

Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu getting simultaneous, unsimulated handjobs in 1900.

Not sure if Taking Tiger Mountain counts as a real movie or should be considered an art film, but it stars a very young Bill Paxton having real sex on camera.

Though it was a prosthetic, the final shot of Sleepaway Camp shocked the hell out of me. Still does!

The two times I remember hearing a gasp in a movie theater was Nicole Kidman dropping her robe in front of a three-way mirror in Billy Bathgate, and (of course) that scene in The Crying Game.

Sleepaway Camp.

Mathilda May in Lifeforce because, well...

Ah, Lifeforce! Crazy amount of dong in that movie, too.

Yeah, some of the European movies, where they're not as sensitive as us and they'll show underage kids naked, like My Dear Killer or Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. (interesting note on Valerie, the actress' mom was on set monitoring the filming. She had no problem with her 12-year old daughter doing a nude scene, but raised a big stink when they had her film a scene as a witch getting burned at the stake.)

Craig Hosoda had a film guide back in the 90s called The Bare Facts, sort of a pre-internet book where you could look up an actor or actress and see which films they appeared nude in. He mentions several times that almost always, female nudity in film is meant to titillate, but male nudity is used for comedic purposes. That's why it was interesting to see a female nude scene used for comedy in the great 90s thriller Mute Witness (seriously, if you haven't seen this movie, go check it out now). In a scene mid film, the lead character (who is mute, hence the title) is alone in her apartment and notices a peeping tom in the apartment building next door so she closes the drapes before taking a bath. She's just in her bathrobe when she's attacked by the villain of the film. Unable to call police, she's frantically searching for help, and remembers the peeping tom so she opens the drapes only to see him busy making dinner or something. To really grab his attention, she opens her bathrobe for a full view but he still doesn't notice. I think that's the only time I can remember a female full frontal nudity scene used for comedy.

Not a prosthetic. It was a guy wearing a mask.

About Schmidt?

Yeah, even in a sleazy low budget movie they weren't gonna put a strap-on on 13-year old Mangled Dick Expert Felissa Rose and film it.

it wasn’t a prosthetic? How could it not be?

In recent years I've been a little shocked – but also somewhat impressed – by a couple of decent B-movie actresses who played major portions of films – or nearly their entire parts of higher-profile films – in the nude. Beyond the obvious reason, you can't help but wonder if such envelope-pushing will help or hinder a career.

Betsy Rue in MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D (2009) and LUCKY BASTARD (2014)
Rue said in interviews that she was never uncomfortable with being nude, which is probably why she had no problem pushing the envelope in these movies while delivering solid performances as well. Not sure if there's more of the same in her other films, but her career did seem to die out around 2016.

Danielle De Luca in NAKED FEAR (2007)
This was De Luca's first proper movie – the last feature to date from Thom Eberhardt of NIGHT OF THE COMET and CAPTAIN RON fame – and she spends a good third, maybe half the movie fully nude, running from a killer hunting her for sport in the desert. She gives a fairly impressive and intense performance for someone fresh out of short films and one Z-grade video movie. This didn't seem to do much for her career, though, as she pretty much went back to slightly better grade schlock until 2011 or so.

Cerina Vincent in NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE.
Can't recall how 'nude' the nude scenes were, but I recall her character being naked throughout, which seemed like a potentially risky career move but she's been working steadily ever since.

Roberta Weiss in ABDUCTED (1986)
Not a nude scene in this one so much as a lengthy undie run as jogger Weiss (mostly a TV bit player of the era up here, with a modest film role in 1983's THE DEAD ZONE) gets put through her paces in the Canadian Rockies by crazy mountain man abductor Lawrence King-Phillips and his conflicted dad Dan Haggerty. Weiss's attire for the climactic, 10-minute run through the rough Canadian wilderness is a badly torn t-shirt, a pair of panties, and her running shoes. Despite being marketed largely on that exploitative element alone, this is actually a very compelling low-budget thriller with unexpected character depth. But, because it's a Canadian picture, no one saw it and Weiss went back to TV until the early 90's. The whole show's on YouTube.

Fully second this. MUTE WITNESS is an amazing low-budget thriller. I'm surprised we're this long into the Blu-ray era and it hasn't been given the Special Edition treatment.

In the documentary Skin : A History of Nudity in Movies, she talks about how mortified she was about it and upset that this was the part she was reading for.

Heh, I still have my copy that I bought back in 1993. I rented a lot of videos based on the book's er, recommendations (they even helpfully added time codes and exact descriptions of what was bared). When I first read in there that Jennifer Connelly was topless in The Hot Spot, and I found the film at the local video store, I felt like I had won the lottery or something.

One that comes to mind that did shock me at the time was Ted Levine's full frontal nudity in Silence of the Lambs when he played transexual serial killer Buffalo Bill. Although he did hide his penis between his legs.

That scene is so weird, it looked to me like they super-imposed her face on a male body.

And we really didn't need to see Jay replicate that scene in Clerks 2, ack.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord had some pretty decent full nudity as I recall. (Daryl Hannah!) Didn't see it in cinemas, but caught it on cable when I was 11 or 12.