The other day, while I was supposed to be in the middle of working on a major project, I found myself eyeball-deep in a friendly conversation covering many years of terrible sex decisions. My buddy and I went back and forth sharing stories that spanned from high school to last Tuesday, each adventure something we were both proud and ashamed of. Just like sticking your hand on a hot stove will teach you to never do that again, these individual moments in our collective history were lessons we learned from—even if they were decisions we’d make more than once. The whole sordid affair got me thinking the next day: “wouldn’t it have been easier to learn from a movie that sleeping with a man on his friend’s makeshift innertube air mattress was probably not the best choice?” I mean, isn’t that what films are supposed to do? Provide audiences with entertaining life experiences that seem too exaggerated to be real? I’ve always appreciated films that present sex as both art and entertainment, but what sometimes makes an onscreen sexual moment memorable is when both the characters and the audience can learn from it. Thankfully for us (well, me), there have been a few films in recent memory that offer pertinent life lessons when it comes to bedroom activities.

Dr. Cole Abaius does an in-depth study of some of the worst threequels in order to divine some fantastic filmmaking lessons. What elements of filmmaking should be avoided at all cost and which are only mildly toxic? Find out inside. But bring a barf bag.

I could have gone ahead and claimed that this trailer looked ridiculously awesome, but that seemed like hyperbole. And that’s just not how we roll.