Valentine’s Day is coming and there’s nothing that we can do about that. Nobody likes it, but we still keep Valentine’s Day around for some reason. It’s the black jellybean of holidays. It’s the Jay Leno of holidays. Actually, it’s less a holiday than it is a billing date on which proof that you’re a good husband or boyfriend is due.
Even if you’re with a cool girl who says that she doesn’t care about Valentine’s Day, you’re gonna feel like a real tool if you don’t do ANYTHING. There’s a 100% chance that one of her friends has a stupid boyfriend who went all out with a truckload of roses and a $300 bottle of Chardonnay at Le Sacre Bleu, leaving you looking as useful as a bag of old banana peels by comparison. If you ever work in a restaurant on The Big Day, you see as many miserable couples as you do happy ones. It’s funny after awhile. For a day devoted to love, Valentine’s Day doesn’t get much of it.
“What should I do for my annoying girlfriend?” “What’s my dumb boyfriend going to do for me?” “What restaurant should I pick?” “Joe’s Crab Shack is romantic, right?” “Will she like these earrings?” “Will the earrings he buys for me this year be as awful as the earrings he bought for me last year?” “What about that girl at work that I sleep with sometimes? Do I need to do something special for her, too?”
So many questions, so few clear answers.
Just stay inside and watch movies, I say.
If you’re single on Valentine’s Day, you’re lucky. If you’re with someone, you could fake a serious illness or temporary affliction. Food poisoning is good because that can happen at anytime for any reason. The only problem there is that your lady might want to take care of you, which gives you the burden of having to act sick for a day or two. It’s too much like elementary school.
The best solution: Tell her that a relative who lives at least eight hundred miles away either just died or had a horrible accident and you need to go to them right now. It’s February 13 and you’re gonna be gone at least two days. Get a good friend to send you a fake text message “informing” you of the bad news for added realism. Unless she’s a COMPLETE jerk, she won’t hold it against you that you need to go see your Uncle Steve, mortally wounded when a Pepsi machine fell on top of him, in Omaha on Valentine’s Day. If she insists on driving you to the airport, let her do it. Then just take an Uber back home and hide out. Buy a disguise if you want. A fake mustache. Glasses. A hat. Pretend you’re a secret agent. Seems exciting to me.
What I’m trying to say is that Valentine’s Day can be fun if you put your mind to it.
While you’re indoors with the curtains drawn and the lights out, here are some good movies to watch for telling Saint Valentine to stick a thousand candy hearts up his medieval ass.
GOODFELLAS
All three of the gangsters at the center of this classic mob movie probably has a great story about shooting, strangling, beating or stabbing somebody with an ice pick on Valentine’s Day. These guys probably don’t even care about Valentine’s Day. If it’s February 14 and they want to play cards, smoke, and drink Cutty Sark with the boys while a Vito and The Salutations record plays in the background then that’s exactly what they’re going to do. It’s all a part of living dangerously. The most romantic scene here is when Ray Liotta pistol-whips Lorraine Bracco’s wannabe rapist neighbor until his face looks like he got hit with five cherry pies. The second most romantic scene is the wedding populated entirely by the New York City criminal underworld, many of whom spend the rest of film trying to kill each other. This is perfect for Valentine’s Day or any other day.
MS. 45
Zoe Tamerlis is so beautiful she could easily get a date for Valentine’s Day, but she’d rather just kill you. In this anti-romantic classic from 1981, she’s a high-strung mute seamstress in sleazy old New York City who gets raped TWICE under two different circumstances in one day. The first guy gets away with it, but she manages to bash in the brains of the second guy. She keeps his body in her apartment, chops it up, and gets rid of the evidence piece-by-piece throughout the city. Along the way she develops a taste for murdering even more men, especially if they show any trace of sexual interest in her. It all culminates in a great costume party scene where Zoe dresses up as a nun with a gun under her habit. Watch this to remind yourself that you don’t hate women. You just hate Valentine’s Day.
ROBOT MONSTER
Unrequited love. She’s a pretty girl and you’re an alien gorilla with a metal space helmet that has rabbit-ear antenna poking out of it. Sometimes that’s how it feels, at least. If you insist on moping like a lonely heart on Valentine’s Day, at least do it with a classic monster movie. In almost all of these things, the monster just wants a girl. If he’s got to kill everyone else to get to her, so be it. Dracula was after a woman. So was The Creature From the Black Lagoon. The Robot Monster in this 1953 gonzo masterpiece is the same thing, but with more fur and a laser gun. He’s part of an alien race who’ve conquered Earth and wiped out everyone except for one family that hides out in the desert. The Robot Monster goes there to kill them, but falls smitten with the family’s oldest daughter. From there, the Robot Monster loses sight of his mission and becomes fixated on getting close to the girl so he can tear off her oh-so-constricting 1950s clothes. Or at least keep her tied up in his cave. My kinda romance.
THE ROAD WARRIOR
After the apocalypse there will be no Valentine’s Day anymore. There will be no jewelry stores and no nice restaurants. The most romantic thing you can do for a woman in the wasteland will be to steal some gasoline for her or shoot someone who’s trying to steal her gasoline. It doesn’t sound that bad. That’s part of why this is the greatest action movie of the 80s AND a great Valentine’s Day-shirking movie. There’s not even a trace of a love story here. There’s a woman or two in this film’s small community that’s figured out how to drill and refine oil in the desert, but Mel Gibson doesn’t have time to romance any of them. He’s too busy brooding, blowing heads off with a rifle and running over mohawk-sporting bandits with a big rig. It’s a mean world here. Even the little kid is a killer. Kill a box of chocolates while you watch this.
BECAUSE OF EVE
Marriage, compassion and venereal diseases. No love story can survive close-up shots of syphilis sores. That kind of thing puts a damper on your mood. Nevertheless, “educational” films like this—”sex hygiene” films, they were sometimes called—were the ONLY way that sleazy producers in the 1940s could put naked people in a movie and show it all over the country. This particular sexploitation hackjob gets right to the point. We’re not fifteen minutes into Because of Eve (1948) before we see nauseating medical footage of penises and vaginas specked with lesions. The threadbare plot concerns an engaged couple who learn of each other’s sordid pasts. HE once contracted a venereal disease and SHE once miscarried an illegitimate child. They argue and call off the wedding, but heal their relationship thanks to glorious education. This education consists of films that their doctor shows them about the ravages of VD and about how babies are born—complete with nude male and female models who are used for our anatomy lessons, the camera zooming in on their genitals so that they fill up your screen like Clint Eastwood’s face in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The “baby” segment is, of course, centered on fluid-splattered, twat-ripping birth footage, with shots so close up on the action that the emerging newborn looks like it’s gonna reach up and wipe slime on the camera lens. After viewing this bloodbath, our young couple in the film are beaming with delight, truly goddamn giddy to have learned something, while I’m still cowering on my couch and wondering whether or not its safe yet to uncover my eyes. If you’re having a sexless Valentine’s Day, this movie will make you feel fine about that.
LEPRECHAUN 2
This movie proves that just because someone is an evil killer leprechaun who likes to claw peoples’ faces off, it doesn’t mean that they’re not sensitive. This is only part two of the seventy-four-part Leprechaun series and our hero already wants to get married. According to mystical leprechaun laws, you have only one shot at it every thousand years. The good news is that to get a bride, all you have to do is make her sneeze three times and that creates a magic spell that forces her to marry you. No dating, no expensive dinners and no wedding rings required. Watch out though, because all someone has to do is say “God bless you” when she sneezes and that breaks the spell and your ass is then forced to wait another millennium for your next shot at wedded bliss. So, that’s what happens here. The leprechaun is in Los Angeles and he wants to marry this cute young blonde chick named Bridget, which annoys her boyfriend a tad. The highlights are the creative kills, including a death by coffee machine. An unsung Valentine’s Day classic. It’s got love on its mind and blood on its hands. Directed by Rodman Flender, who gets my vote as the director with the fakest-sounding name of the 90s.
BARB WIRE
What’s the ultimate Valentine’s Day movie? Casablanca, of course. And what’s the ultimate Casablanca rip-off? Barb Wire, obviously. It’s the EXACT SAME STORY except that it stars a balloon-breasted Playboy Playmate who dresses in black bustiers and has a scene where a fat guy explodes. This is the start and the end of Pamela Anderson’s career as an action star. She’s Barb Wire, a moody bounty huntress/bar owner in a dystopian future America (that means that SHE has the Humphrey Bogart role here). The first half of the movie is a mess, but it’s at about the forty-minute mark when her love interest shows up that the story here becomes very, very familiar. Adding to the goofball brew is Udo Kier as Barb Wire’s dutiful assistant and Steve Railsback as the creepy-eyed villain.
THE FINAL MEMBER
Let’s say that you’re a guy and it’s Valentine’s Day and you’re definitely not getting laid. All you have to do is watch this great 2012 documentary to realize that your penis can serve a higher purpose. This is about the world’s only penis museum, which stands firm and erect in Húsavik, Iceland, and its search for a human specimen. For over thirty years, curator Sigurður Hjartarson has collected cocks from every animal you can think of and he’s surprisingly not insane. He’s a likable and sober scholar who translates 16th century literature and writes nature books when he’s not surveying mongoose dicks. The museum, he claims, is partly for science and partly a social statement intended to diffuse awkward attitudes about anatomy. For two men who volunteer to donate their own meat whistles to the museum’s row of glistening jars though, it’s all about the ego. Here’s the long and short of it: In one corner, you’ve got Páll Arason, a manly Icelandic celebrity who had sex with half the women in Europe in his heyday, now a fragile bag of bones in his 90s. He promises his weathered scepter to the museum upon his death. In the other corner, you’ve got Tom Mitchell, the 60-year-old ultra-creepy American who loves his unit so much that he thinks the whole world needs to know about its greatness. He talks about his stick shift like it’s a person. He’s named it, he draws it, he thinks it looks great in little costumes and he wants to chop it off and send it to Iceland. And, oh yeah, he’s willing to do this while he’s still alive. He just has a few bizarre conditions to go along with it. The museum will only take one, so who comes out on top in this struggle? Which of these two gentlemen gets his dick on display and his balls made immortal? I’m not saying a thing. This movie is too much fun and I don’t want to ruin your Valentine’s Day by spoiling how this all comes out.
TEETH
Let’s say that you’re a girl and it’s Valentine’s Day and you’re definitely not getting laid. Maybe you can relate to this flick from 2007. It’s one of the finest films ever made about a teenage girl with a killer sharp-toothed vagina. A literal vagina dentata. High school’s tough already and on top of that, young Dawn has a cunt that requires both a gynecologist and a dentist. When a lady has a carnivorous cooch, you figure she has two immediate options: a) head straight down the path of anal sex or b) don’t have sex at all. Dawn chooses b) and becomes one of the top members of her school’s abstinence program. Things get complicated when she meets a guy she likes and then it gets even more complicated when he tries to rape her. After that, Dawn figures out a third option for a girl with a shark-like snatch: c) use it as a weapon. Some writers compare this film to David Cronenberg, but they’re reaching. This is a deadpan teen angst black comedy that has little in common with Cronenberg’s frosty medical fixations. I actually see this as something of an update of 1942’s Cat People, and not just because both films are about killer pussies. As in Cat People, this deals with a woman who can’t have sex because of a dark and unbelievable secret. The big difference is that Cat People is told from a man’s point of view and Teeth is told from a woman’s. Whatever metaphor you want to read into it (STDs? General sexual dysfunction? A young person’s anxiety about their first time? A feminist statement?), you probably won’t be bored. Writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein (son of artist Roy Lichtenstein) whips up good entertainment here with lots of clever touches and riotous satire of the stress of active teen celibacy. Like Dawn’s box, this has teeth.
MY BLOODY VALENTINE
You’ve gotta make room in your Valentine’s Day hate marathon for this vintage slasher. It’s 1981 and another psycho killer is on the loose in another small town. In this one, it’s a guy with an old Valentine’s Day grudge that started with a mining accident on February 14, 1960. This little Canadian town stopped acknowledging V-Day for awhile, but now there’s a new generation who just want to have fun and they don’t care about grisly accidents from twenty years ago so they throw a party. In the mines! Eventually the killer shows up with a mining helmet and a pickaxe to hack up bodies and relieve us from having to pay attention to the love triangle among the principle characters. Some of the ghastly stuff here includes a dead body burned up in a laundromat dryer, a human heart delivered in a box of Valentine’s chocolates, a severed head in a refrigerator and the hero’s Canadian accent. Pour yourself some red wine and watch the blood splatter.