Top 10 Worst Panty Scenes in Movies: When Women's Underwear Isn't Sexy

Nudity has become increasingly common in movies and TV series, but scenes don’t have to feature pornographic amounts of skin to be impactful. In fact, many creators have embraced the power of a pair of panties.

The revealing lingerie is often used to sex up PG-13 movies, but sometimes scenes that feature a pair of women’s underwear aren’t meant to titillate; they can also make audiences laugh, gasp or squirm. There are also occasions when a movie scene is just so awful that even an attractive actress wearing the skimpiest of panties can completely fail to steam up the screen. Below are ten of the most creative, cringe-worthy, and downright unsexiest movie scenes featuring the tiny piece of fabric.

'Sixteen Candles' (1984)

Any '80s geek would have loved to have a pair of Molly Ringwald's panties in their possession. However, the way smitten stalker Ted (Anthony Michael Hall) procures this prize in Sixteen Candles is rather sad and pathetic. The perv asks the object of his obsession if he can borrow them to win a bet. What’s unbelievable is that Ringwald's lovesick Sam so easily agrees to part with her panties.

The scene where Ted holds the ill-gotten pair of polka dot panties over his head in front of a gawking group of guys might be one of the most memorable in teen filmdom, but it’s not cool that he’s using the unmentionables to trick his awestruck male brethren into believing that he “scored” with Sam. Worse yet, he's turned his pal's panties into a money-making enterprise.

But the underwear odyssey takes a turn for the truly sinister when Sam's love interest Jake (Michael Schoeffling) offers Ted access to his incapacitated girlfriend in exchange for the panties. Basically, he's letting Ted—and the movie's teen viewers—know that he sees nothing wrong with date rape.

If director John Hughes had gotten his way, the panty storyline would have been given one more cringe-worthy twist. According to Molly Ringwald, he wanted Sam’s dad to notice that her unmentionables were missing.

“It originally ended with the father asking, ‘Sam, what the hell happened to your underpants?’” Ringwald wrote in an article for the New Yorker.

The then-15-year-old actress revealed that her mother objected to the scene, calling it “creepy.” Luckily, Hughes agreed to cut it.

'A Nightmare on Elm Street' (1984)

The 1982 hit Poltergeist was the first horror film to feature a woman writhing around on the ceiling in her underwear, but JoBeth Williams’ memorable scene was meant to appeal to the male gaze. When actress Amanda Wyss flew up into the air in A Nightmare on Elm Street, men weren’t admiring her pristine white panties; they were resisting the urge to cover their eyes as an invisible Freddy Krueger ripped her to shreds in her character Tina’s worst—and last—nightmare.

‘80s slasher flicks had a habit of punishing promiscuous teens with violent ends, and poor Tina was just one of the era’s many casualties. JoBeth Williams’s Poltergeist character was a happily married suburban mom, so perhaps that’s why her scantily-clad ceiling dance didn’t similarly result in a shower of blood.

'Ace Ventura: Pet Detective' (1994)

It’s sad and distressing that this ridiculous Jim Carrey comedy holds the distinction of being one of the first movies to prominently feature a transgender character. It portrays a trans woman as an object of disgust and derision, and it also tries to equate transgenderism with insanity.

Sure, cisgendered Sean Young’s Lieutenant Lois Einhorn is the movie’s murderous villain, but this doesn’t make it okay for the devious dolphin-napper to be forcibly stripped by the movie's "hero" in front of a room full of retching policeman with their guns drawn. The scene where Ace violently yanks on her hair and reveals what she’s hiding in the back of her underwear is so problematic that even dude-bro Joe Rogan has deemed the movie offensive and “insanely transphobic.”

'The Ugly Truth' (2009)

Occasionally, panties don’t even have to be shown to make movie watchers uncomfortable. In this romantic comedy, Katherine Heigl’s character makes the tragic mistake of attending a dinner meeting while wearing a pair of remote-controlled vibrating underwear. Of course, her panties come to life while she’s trying to have a serious business conversation, causing her to uncontrollably twitch and twist around in her chair, while attempting not to let everyone know that she’s on the verge of climaxing.

The scene is given a creepy twist when it’s revealed that an oblivious little boy has discovered the remote control, and he’s the one who is pushing the buttons that are making Abby sweat and squirm. To make matters worse for poor Abby, the obnoxious jerk that she ultimately ends up falling for, Mike (Gerard Butler), discovers that the child has the remote. However, instead of doing anything to save Abby from the horrific situation she has found herself in, he simply chuckles and enjoys the show. He also refuses to step in and speak for her when the not-so-good vibrations leave her so breathless that she can barely talk.

For the record, method actress, Heigl revealed that she tested out a real pair of vibrating underwear herself, and there was no risk of her experiencing an awkward and uncomfortable dinner orgasm like Abby’s forced climax. The actress said that the vibrating panties didn’t do anything for her, and she warned other women away from purchasing them.

'Gone Girl' (2014)

If you still haven’t scene Gone Girl and want to avoid spoilers, you may want to skip this entry.

In this David Fincher thriller based on the popular novel of the same name, Rosamund Pike’s character gets down and dirty with Neil Patrick Harris. Unfortunately for Barney Stinson, his infamous HIMYM playbook didn’t contain any advice on what to do when the woman you’re sleeping with pulls out a box cutter and starts slashing away at you mid-coitus. The end result of this gory sexcapade is Pike rocking a lacy white bra and matching panties soaked with blood. According to the actress, she went through 36 pairs of underwear while filming the disturbing scene.

'Bridget Jones’s Diary' (2001)

Not all unsexy underwear scenes are bloody awful or awfully bloody. In this film, Renee Zellweger’s Bridget faces a conundrum that many women are familiar with: look good with clothing on, or look sexy with clothing off. When she chooses to rock her beige shapewear instead of a pair of sexy black knickers, the “wanton sex goddess” has to deal with the hilarious repercussions of her choice later on when she’s presented with the opportunity to remove her over-sized pants and get in Hugh Grant’s pants.

Luckily for Bridget, Daniel Cleaver seems to have a fetish for “scary” granny panties. She obviously feels humiliated when he sees her in her “enormous” tummy squeezing, gigantic undergarments, but they earn her an enthusiastic "Hello, Mummy" (a line Hugh Grant says that he ad-libbed). It’s just a shame that the guy who is so cool with her shapewear ends up being a complete arsehole.

'Shallow Hal' (2001)

This movie also features a scene involving over-sized women’s underwear, but few female viewers were laughing when a svelte Gwyneth Paltrow picked up a pair of giant panties and pondered over whether they would fit the fatsuit-clad version of her character.

In case you aren’t familiar with this film, actor Jack Black plays a shallow guy (the titular Hal) who begins seeing a sweet and fun overweight woman as his idea of physical feminine perfection: a model-thin beauty who is way out of his league. The movie is just one long, exhausting fat joke, beginning when Hal creepily pulls his vehicle over to follow Paltrow's Rosemary into a lingerie store. The lust-struck perv then attempts to strike up a conversation with Rosemary, as she peruses a rack of satin granny panties. The pickup line he uses is absolutely awful.

“Are those a parachute?” he asks, goofily grinning at his stunned target.

In another scene, Rosemary throws a gigantic purple thong at a confused Hal while he eagerly waits to get it on with his thin fantasy version of her. The underwear are far too large for the real Rosemary, but this is supposed to be hilarious.

Rosemary’s initial assessment of Hal is that he’s a “jackass.” It’s just a shame that the movie doesn’t end there, with her walking away and never looking back at the weirdo who was harassing her while she was lingerie shopping.

'Robin Hood: Men In Tights' (1993)

I loved this movie as a child, but now I find it somewhat disturbing that an attempted rape is used for comedic effect. The only thing that saves Maid Marian from being defiled from the Sheriff of Nottingham is her Everlast chastity belt. Robin Hood's nemesis is so hellbent on having his way with Marian that he travels to the future, procures a jackhammer, and uses it on the indestructible iron underwear.

It’s strange that one of the movie’s major plot points involves getting into Marian’s impenetrable panties, and it’s sad that she seems to believe that her soulmate is the man who possesses the key that unlocks them. My 10-year-old self spent way too much time thinking about her heavy metal diaper: How did she use the restroom? How was she not in constant pain from the bulky contraption? Didn’t it get all swampy and gross in there after she took a bath? And why did all these men want to unlock her iron underwear so badly?

'Armageddon' (1998)

Admit it: You totally shipped Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck after watching this, and hearing Liv’s dad belt out “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” made you tear up for months afterward.

But while this natural disaster flick with a love story was a big hit, it features one disastrous scene that makes Liv’s on-screen lover seem like a bit of a weirdo. Before Ben’s character A.J. helped save the planet from total annihilation, he plays the role of a wannabe Noah in a bizarre pre-sex scene. However, his ark is Liv Tyler’s panties, and his beasts are Barnum’s Animal crackers (this is definitely one of filmdom’s weirdest product placements).

After arguing that animal crackers aren’t really crackers, A.J. marches a few of them around on his girlfriend's partially-exposed body. But things take a really strange turn when he puts her at risk of a yeast infection by sticking one of the sweet treats in her underwear. So how does she respond to this freaky attempt at foreplay? The obviously turned-on Grace bites her lip like Bella Swan, and asks A.J. if he thinks any other weird couples out there with animal cracker fetishes are doing the exact same thing at that very moment. Then the two proceed to make out to the voice of Liv’s dad. It’s enough to make you wish that the asteroid would have won.

'Howard the Duck' (1986)

No one is going to argue that Lea Thompson doesn’t look amazing crawling around on a bed in a pair of silky pink panties. However, in this totally bonkers movie, she’s wearing the sexy lingerie in hopes of seducing an anthropomorphic duck. Luckily, a threesome of human dudes that includes Andy Dufresne and Ferris Bueller’s principal save her from committing an act of bestiality with her "Ducky."

Thompson’s Howard the Duck sex scene might be one of cinema’s most cringe-inducing moments, but at least she wasn't playing a mother trying to seduce her underwear-clad son.