Antichrist, the new movie from fifty-three-year-old Danish bad-boy Lars von Trier, has been called “the most talked-about” new film of the season. Talking about it sure beats watching it. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where its reception suggested an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The International Edition. Von Trier, whose provocations are usually carefully thought out for maximum manipulative effect, reportedly wrote the movie to dig himself out of a crippling depression that had rendered him unable to work, abandoning thoughts of narrative logic and cobbling the script together with images and events largely taken from his dreams. The results definitely put the one about reporting to biology class naked in perspective.
Antichrist opens with married couple Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg having graphically depicted sex, in slow motion and to the accompaniment of an aria from a Handel opera, while their baby does a triple-gainer out the high window. What follows includes the most convincing-looking genital mutilations that you can get on an eleven-million-dollar budget. (Pretty convincing-looking, unfortunately.) Is von Trier right in calling Antichrist the most important film of his career? One thing’s for sure: it might just be the worst date movie ever made. But there are other contenders. If you’re looking to nip a new relationship in the bud, throw a few of these on your Netflix queue.
15. ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968): In a recent episode of Mad Men, Don Draper deposited his pregnant wife in a nurse’s capable hands and then repaired to the waiting room, as the nurse told him: “Your job’s done now.” Tsk-tsk, I know. Still, even if Don didn’t hold Betty’s hand through the delivery, at least he didn’t allow Ruth Gordon to drug her as part of a scheme to pimp her out to the devil — that’s the devil, as in horns, tail, sulphur — to give his acting career a bump. To sum it all up: a lot of low bars got set in the ’60s.
14. THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975): In this post-feminist horror story, the entire male population of a Connecticut suburb called Stepford makes a pact with one of their neighbors, a former Disneyland Imagineer who goes by the Blofeldian name of Dale Koba (Patrick O’Neal), to provide them with obedient, sexually compliant robot duplicates of their actual wives, whose dismantled bodies presumably end up moldering in some Stepford compost heap. Is the 2004 remake starring Nicole Kidman any better suited for mixed-gender viewing? To get an answer to that question, you’d have to find someone who’s seen it. Good luck with that.
13. UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948): Preston Sturges’s nervy romantic comedy about a symphony conductor (Rex Harrison) who suspects that his beautiful young wife has been unfaithful to him is a certified masterpiece, but it’s easy to see how it helped to derail the director’s career when it was sprung on an unsuspecting audience sixty years ago: the fantasy scene in which Harrison laughs maniacally while taking a straight razor to his wife could make Brian De Palma call for a time out. At the time of its release, it didn’t help that Harrison was being blamed in the tabloids for the suicide of his lover, the actress Carole Landis.
12. BAISE-MOI (2000): This ugly-looking film starts out with its anomic heroine being assaulted and gang-raped. When her brother learns what happened, he pulls out a gun and offers to hunt down and kill the assailants. After she tells him not to, he accuses her of having enjoyed it, so she takes the gun and blows his brains out. Then she teams up with a hooker to work out their issues by wasting half the population of France. Inspirational dialogue: “If you park in the projects, you empty your car, ’cause someone’s gonna break in. I leave nothing precious in my cunt for those jerks.”
11. DESCENT (2007): Not to be confused with the all-female-cast spelunking thriller of a few years ago, which seems like a terrific date-night pick compared to this winsome charmer. Rosario Dawson plays an eager young college student taken in by the sleazy charms of Jared, a white doofus who lures her to his pad and rapes her while muttering racial epithets in her ear. Emotionally nuked, Dawson spends much of the rest of the movie in a druggy haze before a hulking muscleman induces her to join him in taking revenge. The climactic set-up requires a rapist to accept a date invitation from his victim and, at her suggestion, readily agree to strip down and let himself be tied to the bedposts.
10. THE LAST WOMAN (1976): In which Gerard Depardieu, faced with a dark night of the soul, decides to solve his problems by lopping his own dick off, an act that he seems to loudly regret. That would count as a spoiler if there were a chance in hell you’d be able to find a copy of the movie.
9. FAT GIRL (2001): Catherine Breillat’s take on the coming-of-age film centers on the chubby, thirteen-year-old Anaïs, who spends much of her family’s seaside vacation watching from the sidelines as her beautiful older sister is romanced by an Italian charmer, until the poor kid has to lie in bed listening to the two of them having sex across the room while she’s trying to sleep. The movie builds to an ending suggesting Breillat took to heart Michael O’Donoghue’s advice that you can wrap up any story quickly and efficiently by writing, “And then they were all suddenly run over by a truck.”
8. FATAL ATTRACTION (1987): There’s nothing like the thrill of seeing feminist rhetoric used as evidence of murderous psychosis and the concept of the American family as a sacred haven that has to be protected at gunpoint from the invading Visigoth single gals. This and the 1994 Disclosure, in which Michael Douglas was sexually harassed by Demi Moore, helped establish Douglas as the Hollywood star who best embodies aging-male sexual paranoia. Hey, at least the pay is good.
7. HAPPINESS (1998): Just to get this out of the way first, the title is intended ironically. Todd Solondz’s alleged comedy features a dozen or so characters, the most sympathetic of whom is the guy who date-rapes his eleven-year-old son’s classmates. “Would you ever fuck me?” his son tearfully asks when he learns the truth. “No,” promises Dad. “I’d jerk off instead.”
6. HUSBANDS AND WIVES (1992): Woody Allen’s parting gift to his long-time partner Mia Farrow — the tabloid scandal that ended their relationship exploded just before it was released — stars Woody as a professor who’s chasing a student at the same time that his wife, Farrow, is trying to channel her own attraction to another man (Liam Neeson) into setting him up with her best friend (Judy Davis). Given how reality turned out, it was hard not to roll your eyes at the ending: Farrow guilt-trips Neeson into marrying her while Allen explains that he’s no longer asking women out because he can’t bear the thought of hurting anyone again. The movie may never play as weirdly again as it did seventeen years ago, but it still records an especially dark and twisted moment in Allen’s ongoing attempt to explain why the game of love is rigged.
5. I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978): This splatter movie has pride of place in the history of abused-women-getting-revenge flicks, not because it’s any good — it isn’t — but because it became semi-legendary after Ebert and Siskel devoted one of their shows to denouncing it, which had the effect you’d expect at the box office. I hope the producers thought to send them a fruit basket. The movie, which was originally called Day of the Woman before it was retitled so that it could play on double bills with something called I Eat Your Skin, stars Camille Keaton as a young writer whose working vacation at her lakeside cabin is interrupted by a pack of goons who beat and rape her and leave her for dead. Her methods of retaliation include castration and disembowelment by motor boat.
4. IRREVERSIBLE (2002): Gaspar Noe directed this movie, which is told in reverse chronological order, moving backwards in time to make a point about the inexorably hopeless nature of life and really shitty movies. It ends, which is to say it begins, with two men committing a brutal, gory murder, which turns out to be retribution for the beating and rape of a pregnant girlfriend, which is depicted in a unbroken nine minutes, which lets the viewer get a good enough look at the rapist to see that the guys didn’t even kill the right man. Like Antichrist, Noe’s film attracted considerable attention after mass walkouts at Cannes.
3. AUDITION (1999): The film that, in the West, made Japanese director Takashi Miike’s name synonymous with “cutting-edge international film”, “provocative midnight cinema”, and “move your legs, I’m gonna hurl!” A lonely, middle-aged widower is persuaded to stage a phony audition for a film role so that he can meet the women who apply and ask one of them out. It’s a thoughtlessly cruel trick, so the woman he does ask out has to work to make him the more sympathetic character. At the risk of spoiling the ending, suffice to say that she’s up to the challenge.
2. IN THE COMPANY OF MEN (1997): This was the first film from writer-director Neil LaBute, who has never fully gotten over the fact that relationships are sometimes shallow and cruel, and who believes that the rest of us should all suffer for his slow learning curve. Aaron Eckhart plays a confident, handsome middle manager who decides to break a deaf woman’s heart — just for the kick it’ll give his ego. The real twist of the knife comes when Eckhart’s more morally aware, less sexy sidekick actually falls in love with the woman, only to have her shut him out because she’s fallen hard for the good-looking scumbag who will never care about her.
1. DEAD RINGERS (1988): David Cronenberg’s previous hit, The Fly, was the best date movie ever made in which the hero turns into a seven-foot insect. Here, Jeremy Irons plays a pair of insects: sexually predatory twin gynecologists whose idea of sweet talk goes something like, “I slave over the hot snatches and he picks up the awards!” By the time our increasingly deranged hero reports to work to try out his innovative new surgical tools for use on “mutant women”, even the guys in the audience are sitting with their legs crossed.