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.”

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