And spare a thought for poor, unbelievably beautiful Iman, who, on this evidence, should have restricted her acting career to the odd Tia Maria commercial. The quartet of unrelated segments starts off with the weakest, a tedious story of a boy seducing his young cousin into giving him a blow job on the beach in time to the rhythm of the tides or some old guff: For all its kinks, this film follows the basic romantic formula of two people who have to overcome obstacles to be together. Starring, for the third time on this list, that kinkster James Spader, along with Holly Hunter, Deborah Unger, Rosanna Arquette and Elias Koteas, the film is really remarkable, though for the cerebral sterility of its execution as, once again, body-horror expert Cronenberg manages to engage the brain and turn the stomach while bypassing the heart entirely. The third strand is the best, featuring Paloma Picasso as Countess Bathory, the real-life Hungarian aristocrat rumored to have bathed in the blood of virgins, while the last details the incestuo-blasphemous shenanigans of Lucrezia Borgia.