This Week in Skinstory: November 1 - 8

A weekly look back at celebrity nudity happenings of note from the earliest days of famous females to today’s hottest starlets.

A weekly look back at celebrity nudity happenings of note from the earliest days of famous females to today’s hottest starlets.

Get the in-depth facts and figures on skincredible events that happened during the week of November 1st through November 8th, including: Kate Winslet nude in Vanity Fair magazine, Mimi Rogers nude in Full Body Massage, Catherine Bach nude in Crazed, Beatrice Dalle nude in Betty Blue, and the deep-impact releases of I Spit on Your Grave and 52 Pick-Up.

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November 3, 1978
I Spit on Your Grave opens in theaters.

“Rape and revenge” stands as one of the most remarkable exploitation genres that, truly, only could have existed in the wild-and-wooly-bushed 1970s. And the Gone with the Wind of rape-and-revenge films is writer-director Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave.

Willowy redhead Camille Keaton (granddaughter of silent-comedy great Buster Keaton) stars as a novelist whose solitary weekend retreat in the woods in interrupted by gang-rape. More than once. She then exacts payback via hanging, axe murder, and death by blood loss from a knife wound where a penis once was.

Spit played grindhouses and drive-ins deep into the 1980s and became an immediate blockbuster in the early days of home video.

It also sent esteemed film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert into spasms of anguish, which is, in fairness, a not unreasonable response. They even dedicated an entire episode of their review program to examining the dreadful implications of a world where I Spit on Your Grave gets classified as entertainment.

In 2003 Quentin Tarantino paid tribute to such cinematic mayhem with his Kill Bill movies, but he softened the specifics by de-sexualizing the violence and tossing around the term “female revenge”. Ebert should have been able to smell right through that.

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November 5, 1995
Full Body Massage with Mimi Rogers nude premieres on Showtime.

Radiantly heterosexual Scientologist Tom Cruise is known for having had two wives—Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes—who, in his presence at least, exude a vibe that might fairly be described as "chilly."

No one would ever apply any such adjective to the first ex-Mrs. Cruise, volcanically voluptuous Mimi Rogers, and nowhere does she burn hotter than in the skinstant classic made-for-cable movie Full Body Massage.

Five minutes in Mimi disrobes, and for the next hour-and-a-half she stays that way. Bryan Brown, possessor of the luckiest hands in human history, oils naked Mimi up and rubs her every which way and loose.

Full Body Massage is essentially one long, glorious, only occasionally interrupted celebrity nude scene, and Mimi Rogers has just the perfect, genuinely full body to make it an enduring milestone, from first physical contact all the way to the extraordinarily happy ending.

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November 6, 2008
Kate Winslet nude in Vanity Fair hits newsstands.

At age 19, curvaceous movie-queen-in-the-making Kate Winslet first tantalized with a hint of nipple in the surreal crime drama Heavenly Creatures (1994), followed up with full-frontal exposure in Jude (1996), and went on to make celebrity nudity history by disrobing in the most popular film of all time, Titanic (1997), as well as multiples other titles, where her nakedness is never less than astoundingly arousing.

Promoting her latest unclothed appearance in the sexually charged World War II saga The Reader (2008), Kate posed bottomless for Vanity Fair and aimed her luscious rump right at the camera, roundly and robustly.

Nearly 15 years after our first glimpse of that flawless Winslet skin, seeing her beauteous gluteus in those glossy pages was guaranteed to get us to crack a smile.

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November 7, 1986
Skin classics 52 Pick-Up and Betty Blue open in theaters on the same day.

The down-and-dirty Elmore Leonard thriller 52 Pick-Up and the rough-and-tumble French romance Betty Blue constitute two prime examples of cinema aimed at adults that does not fit the popular notion of “adult cinema” (i.e., what lies behind the curtain at old-school video rental outlets).

What makes that simple fact even more noteworthy is that 52 Pick-Up is set in the porn industry and is studded with actual porn star cameos, and Betty Blue pushed the boundaries of onscreen sexuality so severely that it had to have several moments excised in the United States to avoid an X rating.

Hot high points of 52 Pick-Up include brutal footage of young Kelly Preston nude while being molested and murdered in a snuff film, Prince protégé Vanity posing for topless Polaroids, and XXX legend Amber Lynn grabbing for some bare-breasted lesbian action during a sex-industry party.

Betty Blue’s bareness is supplied by mountain-mammaried Clémentine Célarié as she suckles a baby and, more importantly (and relentlessly) Béatrice Dalle, giving a stunningly raw performance in the title role—including an oral demonstration that looks very close to being the real deal—that deservedly made her an international movie star and an immediate skinema legend.

Trust us, this Betty won’t leave you with blue balls.

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November 8, 2005
Crazed, with Catherine Bach nude and a Mr. Skin quote on the cover, hits DVD legally for the first time.

The disjointed, mysterious thriller Crazed, a.k.a. Nicole, looks to have been made in 1973, was reportedly first released in 1978, and stars gracefully maturing French ingenue Leslie Caron as a lesbian obsessed with a young, busty American brunette.

The object of Sapphic affection is embodied by Catherine Bach, five full years before she (barely) donned cut-offs as Daisy Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard, which made Crazed a sought-after video on the bootleg market for decades.

In 2005 Troma Films finally issued an official version of Crazed on DVD, bolstered by a Mr. Skin endorsement on the box cover, and, at last, fans could see (sort of) clearly Catherine’s luscious casabas in the raw and enjoy the way Leslie scoops them up and gives them a loving squeeze.

So since Bryan Brown in Full Body Massage possesses the luckiest human hands of all time, let's award second place to Leslie Caron.

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Next week in Skinstory: Deep Throat, Russ Meyer's Mondo Topless, blonde Marisa Ryan (one of the daughters from the '90s sitcom Major Dad) goes nakedly lesbian in Slaves to the Underground, and more. Don't be caught short without your weekly dose of Skinstory!