The 6 Most Unintentionally Creepy Movie Romances
Ask any 10-year-old boy, and he'll tell you: Romance is gross. One look at the average Hollywood movie is going to tell you he might just be right.
Somehow, without the filmmakers even noticing, they come up with romantic plotlines that are somewhere between "creepy" and "fuel for your darkest nightmares."
Case in point:
#6.
BIG
The Romance:
Let's be honest, when 12-year-old Josh Baskin wished that he could be "big" he was probably talking about his penis. So, the next morning, when he wakes up to discover an adult-sized dong in his underoos, he happily accepts the fact that his newfound wang comes at the price of 17 years of his life, and he sets out to use that dong.
"...but please, PLEASE don't make me look like that guy from Bosom Buddies."
Luckily for Josh, a sexy and ambitious toy executive in the person of Elizabeth Perkins is happy to lend a hand.
Wait, Something's Not Right Here...
The words "illegal," "immoral" and "icky" spring immediately to mind. Remember, Josh made that wish to be "big" because he was sick of waiting around for puberty. We would give the writers the benefit of the doubt and assume it just slipped their minds that this was (mentally and emotionally) a pre-pubescent kid being seduced by a 30-something woman. Then again, it seems hard to miss when Josh's big love scene comes right after the scene where he celebrates his 13th birthday. With his 13-year-old best friend.
It's not like they're even trying to hide the fact that their seemingly grown-up protagonist is still a child. Hell, his childlike manner was what attracted Perkins in the first place, which just adds another little layer to the already creepy romance.
Pictured: Completely natural, totally grown-up and in no way childish foreplay.
#5.
Superman
The Romance:
Let's face it, any other guy who had his eyes on Lois Lane never stood a chance. She was seeing a tall, good looking guy with a chiseled frame and, oh yeah, he could fly and bench press several Mack trucks. It's kind of hard to compete with that, and even harder to compete with a guy who can fly around the world so fast he actually reverses its rotation, sending everything back in time in order to save her life. That makes your roses and box of chocolate look like a big pile of shit.
Wait, Something's Not Right Here...
You'll probably remember that one of the catch phrases they always use to introduce Superman, right after all the "faster than a speeding bullet" stuff, is "strange visitor from another planet." You know, as in, he's not from Earth. As in, he's not a human being.
Sure, he looks like a human man, thanks to whatever one in a quadrillion coincidence of evolution caused life on Krypton to look just like ours. And he's got a presumably working humanoid dong, but that doesn't change anything. Lois Lane fucked an alien.
Like this, only a little less furry.
Despite appearances, Superman's physiology is so radically different from ours (ie, he can take a shotgun blast to the eyeball without blinking) that biologically Lois would be closer to a donkey. So, yes, it's like some kind of some kind of space bestiality.
Wait, no. Not "like bestiality." It is bestiality. And, considering Superman's immeasurable, godlike superiority, Lois is the beast in this equation.
#4.
Overboard
The Romance:
When the very rich and very terrible Goldie Hawn falls out of her yacht and develops amnesia, Kurt Russel and his mullet decide to swoop in and trick her into thinking that she's been married to him for the last 13 years. Kurt is the good guy in the movie, by the way.
From there, the shenanigans unfold as Kurt treats her like a slave and the two fall in love. Of course, after she gets her memory back, she decides she wants to stay with Kurt forever.
Wait, Something's Not Right Here...
It's not often that you can get away with making a breezy comedy about a hillbilly kidnapping and enslaving an heiress while portraying the hillbilly as the protagonist, but that's exactly what happened here. Sure, it's played off as being all in good fun to teach Goldie a valuable lesson about respecting all people and yadda yadda yadda, but still. Kidnapping.
You could sort of call it brainwashing, too. And, in a way, when she finally warms up to him and they knock boots, you could kind of call that rape. After all, you could make a solid argument that the decision was less free will and more Stockholm Syndrome.
Pictured: Courting.
We're not meant to think about it in these terms because Kurt is just a gruff carpenter with four children to feed, while Goldie is the snotty bitch who hired him to do $600 of carpentry work, treated him like crap and then pushed him out of a boat without paying him. But we can't recall the last kidnapping case where the old "but she owed me money!" defense kept anybody out of prison.
f*****g aliens? no problemo, with starfleet issue condoms...
ReplyConcerning Twilight, it has been said before but let's remind people of a little bit of physics. No beating heart -> no blood pressure -> no erections.
ReplySensemaker
I would have added Anakin and Padme to this list. That was a creepy romance.
Replylongest word in english language: Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
Replyis, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "a factitious word alleged to mean 'a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, causing inflammation in the lungs.[1]'
What's wrong with sex with an alien?
Reply Hide All See All 5 Replies1. No more than what is wrong with having sex with an animal. They are not the same creature type as you, therefore, it's technically considered unnatural.
2. If the alien is not sapient, then it's still fully bestiality, akin to statutory rape. The creature you're doing doesn't have the capacity to make a formal decision to mate with you, weighing the pros and cons of going outside of their species.
3. If the creature is sapient, then at least you could both make the decision, after having thought out the consequences.
4. Part of how we get diseases that animals carry is through consistent exposure to their diseases until a suitable strain can jump the species barrier. Consider how much interaction, historically, humans have had with cats. Now, think about how the HIV virus spreads (you have to have unsterilized contact with bodily fluids). There's only 2 ways for both cats and humans to have variant strains of this same disease --sex or unnatural blood contact. Honestly, I don't want to figure out which one it was. If there's any diseases an alien could possibly share with a human, we increase the risk of that unnatural disease carrying over into one or the other population. This is not a good thing. This new disease does not have immune systems that are geared towards combating the virus. There is some evidence that the cat populations have lived with their HIV long enough to adapt to it--just like we are hearing of a handful of people, worldwide, that are immune to our HIV, after only really knowing about this disease for 30 years? That means that we most likely got it from cats. We do know that some of the earliest cases came out of Africa.
Similar things have happened with humans. Most of the Native Americans of the USA were killed by European diseases due to not having been long inoculated form it (by either having lived through or getting the immunity from mother's milk).
So, what kind of disease are you willing to risk to boink an alien? How about something similar to Ebola? Heck, something as strong as the Flu, Meningitis, or Herpes can kill, and that's not even the deadly diseases Humans carry.
I was just going to say "They never buy you flowers afterwards", but CynicalC probably raises more valid points.
Wow..CynicalC's response should be in an article called " The Top Ten Unintentionally Creepy Cracked Comments."
look, cynicalc...i'm 4 days away from hooking up with Liara T'Soni again after all these years. i'm not about to let you ruin that hot asari action with your pessimism.
CynicalC: 2 and 3 = the difference between Captain Jack Harkness (sexual preference: sentient and consenting) and Captain John Hart (sexual preference: alive). 4: you've got this a bit mixed up. The easiest way to get a blood-born disease is through blood, obviously - and the word "unnatural" means absolutely nothing in this context (or most others). We probably got HIV from African monkeys (this is really not very controversial), because people used them for food. Butchering animals without wearing good quality modern protective gear is an effective method if you want to get animal blood into your nice fresh wounds. And the reason why we can get diseases from monkeys fairly easily is because we are so closely related. There's no reason to believe aliens would be sufficiently similar to us that the same pathogenic organisms would be capable of surviving in both them and us.
Um... How about the fact that Edward is a supposed "vampire," and he eventually is supposed to have sex with Bella? Vampires are supposed to be dead. Last I heard, you couldn't get one up without adequate blood flow... The whole story is not only creepy, it's complete bullshit.
Reply Hide All See All 3 Repliesthanks for applying conservative science to liberal bullshit drama show to highlight the issue in today's society - vampires with erectile disfunction. VED affects over 10 of the vampires.
But to join you in this retardation, I would offer that the blood flow can be enhanced by drinking some blood prior to engaging in vampire orgies.
Also, Magic.
I believe the solution to this problem may have something to do with the fact that while a normal human stomach has a capacity of approximately 1.5 liter, a vampire is apparently capable of draining an adult human of blood by drinking it in one go. The average adult has almost 5 liters of blood. All that fluid has to go somewhere!
The other thing about Meet Joe Black is that the poor guy Death took for a ride is just a copy of guy who got mown down by speeding Taxi. He's been certified dead, there will have been autopsy reports and an inquest. The driver will probably have been investigated. His family will have had to identify his body. There will have been a funeral.
ReplyNot only has he got no idea what Death has been doing in his place, he has no life to go back to. At some time the authorities will become aware that there is dead man wondering about the place and want to know what is going on, unless it's not an isolated incident, and Death does that sort of thing every year, like a summer holiday.
As a person who has slept with many people in one room (camping and the like) I can tell you, sleeping people are not very romantic. They shuffle, they speak, they have saliva on their pillow, they snore, they fart... not a pretty picture. They are calling 'looking has as she sleeps romantic" I find it... disturbing and invasion of privacy.
Replyyoure a weirdo ive camped hundreds of times and im always confortable cause only way you sleep is if youre exhausted from camping.. hiking... eating bbq.. how can you pay attention to sneezes and snores when being a nomad in the wilderness?
That's like brining your iPod to a camping trip....
Eneya is a weirdo because they don't pike out before others?
No, it simply means they are more like Batman than you are.
Always did find the 'lurking in the bedroom' in Twilight creepy and I AM a fan.
ReplyBut that as no 1? Overboard, Ghost and Meet Joe Black all had creepier elements. I don't think Twilight should've beaten them out for the top spot.
Yeah, but there's that extra creepy bit in twilight about the baby and the other guy. With all of it's creepy elements combined, Twilight wins by a landslide.
Oh, if you are willing to go back in time, you can find some pretty creepy romances. In The Unforgiven (1960-- not the Clint Eastwood movie), Audrey Hepburn and Burt Lancaster decide to get married even though they have been raised as brother and sister to the extent of having both been breastfed by the same woman.
ReplyAlso, speaking of Lillian Gish (the mother in question in The Unforgiven) she starred in a movie in 1919 called Broken Blossoms, in which an adult immigrant to London from China, who barely speaks English, and smokes way too much opium, falls in love with a teenager, and kidnaps her to get her away from her abusive father. As creepy as the romance is, though, it's less awful than life with her father, and it's hard to know what to make of the movie, particularly since Gish turns out a really wonderful performance. You kind of want to like the movie, and you hope that the people who made it know how creepy it is. Sad to say, I think not, because I once saw a letter Gish wrote to the author of the story the movie was based on. Maybe she was just being polite.
I always thought the ending of David Copperfield was creepy, when (SPOILERS, I guess, although it's a 200-year old novel) he marries the girl that was basically his sister. But then, he's kind of a douche through the whole novel.
Hey, knowledge changes from year to year. If Edward hadn't been to high school since 1922, he wouldn't know how to hack into the school's file system, which he obviously needs to be able to do, so the secretary quits asking him when his old middle school is going to send his records, and when they're going to get proof of his MMR vaccine.
ReplyIf you were to be picky, in Twilight, although the age gap is undeniably gross, they explain his being in high school as being necessary to blend in a new place as he looks young. If he starts high school as an old looking 15yr old, he can last til hes a young looking 25 yr old before he needs to change location. Hes been to a lot of high schools to, they have all his graduation caps on the wall.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesAnd now I sound like a nerd about a film Ive seen maybe twice ever.
Pretty sure they don't let you stay in high school for ten years because you look the part.
It is still rather contrived, and there is absolutely no reason for it other than for him to be in the same place as Bella and to appeal to the Highschool girl demographic.
In over one-hundred years they have not thought of a better solution than sending him to High School every ten years? There has to have come a point where he stopped and realized that spending seven hours of every day to relearn Algebra and the symbolism behind 'Catcher in the Rye' is a really s****y idea.
easiest fix ever: "Why aren't you in school young man?"
"Oh, I'm home-schooled."
But then we'd never have Bella meet Edward at high school and then we'd never have Twilight.
*sigh* if only!
Edward fulfills both the "high school hottie secretly loves quiet nerdy girl" fantasy and the :older man who subconsciously reminds teenage girls of their emotionally absent fathers" fantasy.
Starting out in HS still doesn't make sense. Even if he looks young why not start out as a college freshman, plenty of them look young. He could still hop around every 10 years and possibly become the most educated person ever, holding PHDs in over a dozen topics.
Where the hell can I find that On a Pale Horse book?
ReplyIt was written by Piers Anthony and was the first of the Incarnations of Immortality series. You can find it on Amazon, and it's totally worth the read!
I didn't see "On a Pale Horse" anywhere in the article, so seeing a mention of this randomly in the comments seriously perked me up. The whole "Incarnations of Immortality" series (of which On a Pale Horse is the first) is really good. "For Love of Evil" has, to this day, been my favorite book. Though you've probably found it by now, most libraries have Piers Anthony's various series on their shelves.
I don't get Twilight. I just don't see the big deal why a vampire would even bother dating a zombie.
ReplyNow I get needing something to do in the eternity of life a vampire tends to have (unless you're an ugly evil vampire not currently banging Buffy) and if I was immortal, I'd spend the time learning. Multi-lingual, arts, math, whatever. Hell, I'd aim to cure cancer. But High School? f**k that.
ReplyIt's either the best place on Earth or the worst.
But either way EVERYTHING you do in High School WILL ALWAYS MATTER when you're an adult.
The "Wash U" comment bugs me. There IS no "Wash U" in Washington. There's the University of Washington (or "Udub") and Washington State University ("WSU" or "wazzoo"). Unless Edward's ex-girlfriend went to Washington University?
ReplyMaybe it's a subtle jab on how Edward needs to wash his hair.
Lois is a sexy beast
ReplyThe age thing isn't my biggest problem with Twilight, but it's up there. Understandably Edward's body will always appear to be 17 years old, and to a small degree his emotional maturity will also be stunted (most humans' brains don't reach complete maturity until their early-mid 20's). But you can't tell me that living 108 years won't cause you to mature considerably.
ReplyThe entire plot of that Joe Black movie sounds absolutely stolen from Piers' Anthony's "On A Pale Horse" where the incarnation of death is offered a magician's daughter to prevent his going to hell... damn good book.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesAGREED! On all counts. The rest of Anthony's "Incarnations" series is phenomenal as well.
I love Piers Anthony. I thought I was the only one who saw the simularities. I even tryed to get people to read it, to see what I was talking about. No takers.
Except that Meet Joe Black is a remake of a movie called "Death Takes a Holiday," which was made in 1934.
"Except that Meet Joe Black is a remake of a movie called "Death Takes a Holiday," which was made in 1934."
Death takes a Holiday...short for "Death takes a Holiday to f**k your daughter"
i wasn't nearly as big a fan of the rest of the "incarnations" series as i was of the first book. i remember "wielding a red sword" being very bizarre. fantastic reference though!
I don't think what Superman and Lois had going on was bestiality since both are sentient beings, capable of making decisions etc. Both are of different species but it's not like a human and a horse. Twilight however creeps me out at how popular it is. I barely managed getting through the first book without wanting to burn it and the movies are no better. I regularly like most depictions of vampires, whether seductive or just plain outright scary. This series just played out more like Edward could be a douche, destructive, abusive stalker who loved this teenage, insecure girl while he just happened to be a vampire.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesYou make that sound like its a bad thing...
Jeez, what girl wouldn't want to be stalked by the immortal bastard child conceived during a drunken encounter between Dracula & Tinkerbell?
i'm guessing you've never read the books or actually watched the movie. if you had, you would think that is was bella who was destructive, and stalked edward.
shut up, i work with teenagers, i read what they read.
buddahflyy - I have read all four books, and while part of me agrees that Bella is destructive, Edward stalked is and is clearly abusive mentally and emotionally. I mean, in one of the books he screwed up the engine of her car so that she couldn't go see Jacob, because it was too "dangerous." Then there is the creepy age difference.
@buddahflyy..I'm guessing that you haven't read the books, because Edward is depicted even more of a douche, destructive, abusive stalker. Bella is just a clumsy, vapid moron either way. His family is just as bad. Bella has absolutely no control over her own life once these bloodsuckers enter her life. In my opinion, Stephanie Meyer is a battered wife, and is reaching out for help the only way she knows how: writing a terrible book full of metaphors. Why else would someone write such trash; she's a terrible writer, even if the plot was completely different, i.e. good.
Ahem. I read the entire series. It was introduced to me by a girl, and I had no idea of the implications I would be facing shortly after. I have not seen the movies. However, I think I know enough to say that the both stalked each other, and they both abuse each other. Edward just has significantly more control in that he can come and go whenever he wants, regardless of what anyone says, regardless of whether or not someone locks a door (To quote Bella, "I'm not afraid of anything that would be stopped by a locked door."). Then there's the whole "I want to be with you, but I can't because I can break you, but I want to be with you, but I mustn't, but I must," that was in every. Single. Book. Even a little in the fourth one. If not physically abusive, it is psychologically.