Critiquing the facial expressions a person makes during sex is…well, it’s like critiquing the facial expressions a person makes during a sneeze. How you react to what’s happening to your body is largely involuntary, and at any rate unselfconciousness is a valuable trait for sex since it’s easier to get where you want to go if you’re not fretting about the right way to get there. But hey, this is acting, right? So I don’t feel as churlish as I otherwise would to draw a distinction between these two Dr. Elizabeth Clay sex-face moments.

The pout, I find funny. It’s like “Ooh, this is sexy, I’m sexy, he’s sexy, this feels sexy, look at me being sexy.” Imagine Dalton doing it—he’d look even goofier than he does when he’s got his getting-down-to-business face on while stalking her around the room like a literal sex panther waiting to strike. I don’t fault her for it! Sometimes people sincerely feel this way during sex, and make “sexy” faces to show both themselves and their partner that what’s going on is hot stuff. It’s not like she’s wrong if that’s what she’s doing. It’s just a little pose-y, a little Whitesnake video-y, a little Playboy Channel-y. In those respects it’s of its time.

The laugh, though? Hooo boy. That’s the good shit right there. If you’re laughing out of sheer delight during sex, something has gone very very right for you, that’s one thing. The other thing is that this allows us to perceive the Doc, and Dalton too once he starts grinning in response, as being in on the joke. She knows it’s kind of ridiculous to go to a dude’s barnpartment, look at your psychotic ex-husband’s mansion across the way, talk about your uncle raising you and your parents dying and your marriage collapsing, go for a guy’s junk before so much as kissing, get hoisted in the air to mount him while he stands up, get slammed up against the wall, and get slammed up agains the wall. Ya gotta laugh, folks!

So she does, and the moment is beautifully, erotically unselfconscious. It opens up the path to the scene’s climax (though not the participants’), in which Dalton holds her up and shuffles them both over to the bed with his pants half-down and a licensed medical practitioner around his waist, a move they both know is equal parts silly and cool. It’s an echo, in its way, of the way Carrie Ann gazes with slackjawed lust upon Dalton’s behind. That was her private moment; this is a moment Elizabeth is experiencing with Dalton, and it’s so much fun she’s got to share it with him. She can’t help it. It just bubbles up inside her, until release.

A friend—one of the friends with whom I first saw Road House, now that I think of it—once told me back in my comics-critic days that I was effectively three critics in one. There was, he said, the guy who loves horror, the guy who cares a lot about properly staged action sequences, and (the briefest abashed pause here, if I recall correctly) the horndog. This felt pretty fair to me at the time. Add long takes to the mix and you’ve pretty much nailed my interests as a critic of film and television as well. Which is why it may surprise you (and him!) to learn that until two days ago, I had no idea that Kelly Lynch got her tits out during the sex scene from Road House.

Afterwards? Sure. I mean, they’re pretty hard to miss. As is her butt, and Patrick Swayze’s butt before it, and Sam Elliott’s pubic bush after it, and the topless dancers, and Denise’s strip tease, and Horny Steve and His Regular Saturday Night Thing, and (if we’re simply counting sexy bodies prominently displayed, not nudity specifically) Swayze’s glistening torso, and even Well-Endowed Wife’s pair of attitudes. This is not a film that wants to hide its horniness as a general rule.

But here’s how I know this is an effective sex scene: For a decade and a half I never gave Doc’s breasts so much as a glance. I was riveted by her face, limned by the moonlight; by Dalton’s face, gazing into hers; by her hands, exploring Dalton’s muscular chest through his, uh, beige sweater vest over white t-shirt combo; by his hands, covering hers, guiding hers, lowering them downward. It wasn’t until my partner pointed them out that I noticed them at all, and even then I wasn’t sure I’d caught what she’d said until I reviewed the footage.

But the sex scene from Road House casts a weird spell that way. Until three days ago, I believed that the initial penetration occurred before the pair kissed. The abruptness and intensity of the coupling and the tension of that near-miss kiss simply overwrote my memory of the real thing, which is that they prepare themselves for penetration before kissing but actually do exchange a short hard kiss before going through with it.

Go ahead, try to come up with another sex scene you can think of where its suggestive power outstrips its reality on screen this completely. It’s hard, right?