Ms. Fanservice/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


You'd almost forget she's being chased by a killer. [1]

Examples of Ms. Fanservice in Film include:

Gwen DeMarco: Fred, you had a part people loved. I mean, my TV Guide interview was six paragraphs about my boobs and how they fit into my suit. No-one bothered to ask me what I do on the show.
Fred Kwan: You were... umm, wait...
Gwen DeMarco: I repeated the computer, Fred.

  • Hardly a new concept, as many an early Hollywood film gratuitously featured one single female character who was there for one reason only. Think back to Raquel Welch relegated to the scuba bikini in Fantastic Voyage or the famous fur bikini in One Million Years B.C..
    • Mad Magazine addressed this directly in their parody of Fantastic Voyage as the main characters going on their mission give their exposition introductions - she says "I'm going because wait and see how I look in a skin-tight diving suit!"
    • And don't forget the warden's assessment in The Shawshank Redemption: "What say you there, fuzzy britches?"
  • Bond Girls.
  • Cerina Vincent as the naked foreign exchange student "Areola" in Not Another Teen Movie.
    • To a lesser degree in Cabin Fever, where she has numerous nude scenes and for most of the rest of the movie, is wearing skin-tight sweaters and jeans. There's a slow-mo close-up of her butt(in jeans). To top it off, her character, Marcy, changes lovers at the drop of a hat and is shown to be a vigorous lover, even when she's supposedly depressed.
  • Altaira (Anne Francis) from Forbidden Planet.
  • Lola from the theatre/film musical Damn Yankees. Reportedly, the original Broadway production sold tickets faster when the poster was changed to Gwen Verdon in tights.
  • An early Jennifer Connelly film called Career Opportunities had her bouncing around the whole film in a thin white tank top with no room for anything underneath.
    • Speaking of Jennifer Connelly, back when she was younger and not Hollywood-skinny in The Rocketeer, she spent the latter half of the movie running around in a low-cut silk dress.
    • Speaking of Jennifer Connelly, The Hot Spot includes a scene where Connelly and another actress sit around topless having a conversation for no particular reason.
    • Speaking of Jennifer Connelly, how about the Black Bra and Panties she shows off in Some Girls?
    • And speaking of Jennifer Connelly, there was little other reason for the "noisy workers" scene in A Beautiful Mind but to feature her leaning out of the window while the classmates and her professor leered at her.
  • Maureen Johnson in Rent. An interesting if not exactly likable character and played by a very capable actress in Idina Menzel, but holy crap...
    • If she qualifies what about Mimi, you know, the stripper?
      • The stripper who's a complete wreck of an addict and dying of AIDS?
  • Repo! The Genetic Opera has a ridiculous amount of this--Amber Sweet, the henchgirls, the genterns, the scalpel sluts...
    • Except that all of those are essentially the same thing (well, Amber is Rotti's daughter as opposed to an employee per se, but she's clearly a scalpel slut). And they're justified in-universe as the Gene Co equivalent of the Pan Am stewardess: Rotti Largo knows very well that sex sells.
  • Luster the sorceress in the game-within-a-show of The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, (at least when she's being played by a female actor), in contrast to the more ladylike fighter Daphne.
  • Cyd Charisse<nod>'s legs in any number of MGM musicals.
  • Star Wars has Twi'leks, Padmé, and Leia.
  • Megan Fox.
  • Halle Berry, especially in Swordfish, with a completely gratits... gratuitous topless scene.
  • Brazilian movie A Mulher Invisível has Amanda, an Imaginary Lover, played by one of the hottest Brazilian actresses (Luana Piovani), who spends most of the film in underwear. No wonder she is imaginary.

Of course you aren't real! It's called "ideal woman" because it's something that can only exist in an idea!

  • In the 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left, the bad girl barely wears anything in the last half, and actually strips off her t-shirt within seconds of being introduced. Also for the gorn crowd, the evil teens' abuse victims are killed while stripped down, as well as the bad girl, who is wearing only her panties as she fights with the heroes. And then she's grazed on both sides of the head and knocked against the bathroom wall, and left bleeding out in a sexually suggestive pose. For a thriller which doesn't focus on this aspect in dialogue, it sure relished the Male Gaze in the way it was shot.
  • Class: A 1983 teenage sex comedy. Every 80s sex comedy is required by law to have at least one female character dedicated to fanservice of some type. Virginia Madsen serves that purpose here, with a slapstick scene that ends up with half her blouse being torn off.
    • Excuse me, Miss Madsen, but aren't you a little, um, big to be going braless under your school uniform blouse?
    • Her character was indeed well developed and fleshed out.
  • The Rocky Horror Picture Show - Janet, Magenta, Columbia, Frank...
  • X-Men: First Class has January Jones as Emma Frost.
    • Every female character in the film qualifies. The movie has Jennifer Lawrence and very briefly an uncredited Rebecca Romijn as Raven/Mystique, Rose Byrne as an FBI agent going undercover in lingerie, and Zoe Kravitz as smoking hot flying/acid-spitting exotic dancer Angel.
  • Cannibal Ferox
  • Cannibal Holocaust
  • Prisoner of the Cannibal God
  • Scarlett Johansson stripping down to her red lingerie in He's Just Not That Into You. As David Letterman once put it, "I cannot thank you enough."
  • Wild Wild West. Salma Hayek's character sure does look good. It helps that she spends a good chunk of the film in little more than a corset. Hayek's character is a particularly egregious example, as she's basically extraneous to the film's plot.
  • Pretty much every female character in Sucker Punch.
  • Trash (played by Linnea Quigley) in Return of the Living Dead: She strips in an early scene, then basically spends the entire film wearing only legwarmers. Arguably becomes Fan Disservice once she becomes a naked zombie, though she doesn't look too different in that form. Writer/director Dan O'Bannon has said that when he saw more females in audiences than he expected, he wished he'd thought to show male character Suicide naked too, for the sake of equal opportunity Fan Service.
  • Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof is choked with this; the first group's outfits, lingering shots of Julia's feet, Butterfly's lap-dance, Lee dressed as a cheerleader, Abby not wearing a bra, Zoe Bell riding the hood of the car, with her shirt sliding up a bit, and then a lingering shot of Abby, Zoe, and Kim's asses (the latter two wearing painted on jeans), as they strut towards Stuntman Mike's wrecked car.
  • Lindsay Lohan in I Know Who Killed Me and Machete.
  • Jessica Alba in... general.
  • Monica Bellucci in pretty much anything.
  • Yesterday Was a Lie is unique in that the two lead characters - both female - are fanservice.
  • At least one group of young science fiction fans went to see Lifeforce under the impression that it would be an actual science fiction movie as opposed to "Naked Vampire Chick from Outer Space." (It also featured Patrick Stewart, though, so it wasn't all bad. And the special effects were pretty nice, too. Both of them, if you know what I mean.)
  • If you like your movies Darker and Edgier, Maggie Gyllenhaal often fills this role.
  • Drew Decker from Scary Movie starts making sexy poses after the killer rips off her clothes leaving her in her bra.

Back to Ms. Fanservice
  1. Source: Scary Movie