Ten bad date movies for Valentine's Day

While Valentine‘s night may tap into the old romantic in you, Time Out offers ten films that will surely suck any whiff of love from the room in an instant.

1. Cross of Iron (1977)
Far from the warm Soave and diner-a-deux conveyor belt of the metropolitan Valentine’s evening lie the freezing steppes of the Russian front, where your main squeeze is the trigger of an MG42 and painting the town red involves a squadron of Stukas. Following Sergeant Steiner (James Coburn) and his ever-dwindling squad as they retreat from the unstoppable Red Army, Peckinpah’s masterful slo-mo carnage will reveal more about your relationship than words can ever say, and themes of emasculation, pointless attrition and impending betrayal will have you both itching to get back out there, where the Iron Crosses grow.

2. Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
Sometimes there’s nothing like locking yourself and a loved one away from all the frippery and pointless expense of VD and having a nice, quiet night in. In this case, it’s a quiet night in an Argentinian prison cell, where hardcase Raul Julia and flighty William Hurt coo sweet nothings about political reform, state-sponsored death squads and moral turpitude to each other over their spag bols. Things take a turn for the worse, however, when Julia’s ‘home brew’ fails to live up to its reputation…

3. New York, New York (1977)
The cinematic equivalent of those couples (it’s never you, oh no) dressed to the nines and drunkenly swearing at each other at the cab stand of any grim town centre in the early hours of February 15, Scorsese’s attempt to make lavish, big-band musical-romance about two star-crossed lovers follows the well-worn path of many a Valentine’s night out. What begins as an over-elaborate stab at whimsy rapidly descends into back-biting, spitting and physical abuse as Robert De Niro’s psychotic saxophonist gooses Liza Minelli’s spunky lounge singer up and down Broadway on VJ Night.

4. The Grifters (1990)
Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day all come at once for lucky young John Cusack in Stephen Frears’ adaptation of hardboiled novelist Jim Thompson’s Oedipal con-man caper. Angelica Huston is the mom who wants to give little Johnny a present he’ll never forget in return for a ticket out of Palookaville after an impossibly daring and complex scam known as ‘The Chinaman’s Moustache’ goes south. Every strand of the rich emotional tapestry of Cava season is present; there’s greed, disillusionment, lust, envy, brooding resentment and, of course, there's claret everywhere.

5. Kids (1995)
A rumour went round a few years back which said if you were to write a sentence that contained the terms ‘Valentine’s Day’ and ‘Larry Clark', the entire Western hemisphere would instantly fold in on itself. Obviously, it’s just one of those filmic folk tales to swiftly file next to other such fabricated nonsensicality as ‘John Belushi loved hard drugs’ and ‘John Waters is gay’. But seriously now, there can be few worse romantic blunders than choosing February 14 to sample this two-hour realist dirge of rat-faced delinquents drinking Vimto from their mums' tampons, cracking skateboards over each others' heads and spreading STDs like Nutella.

6. Nil by Mouth (1997)
They say romance is dead. Well, she almost was in Gary Oldman’s brutal portrayal of domestic violence and working class swearing, as Ray Winstone gets into a jealous tizzy when he spies the missus (Kathy Burke) playing snooker (no, literally) with another man. He knocks ten bells out of her (natch), then quickly descends into a one-man Roman orgy of Glen’s Vodka and symbolic mirror-smashing to an accompaniment of miscellaneous garbled cockney jabberwocky and theatrical dribbling. Not one to watch over your microwave balti, or, indeed, after that weekly romantic trip to the local pool hall.

7. Zardoz (1974)
Fundamentalist lovebirds of all religious stripes will thrill to our hero's rallying cry of ‘The Gun is good! The Penis is bad!’, but may be less impressed with Sean Connery’s titchy underpants-and-bandolier get-up as he touts his holy war from the mouth of a giant flying stone head. This being 1974, his targets are an upper-crust set of whey faced Californian crystal-gazers whose post-apocalyptic society exists entirely on the production of innumerable floaty muslin kaftans. Their leader, Charlotte Rampling, employs her wolfish gaze to particularly creepy effect but can’t resist pony-tailed Connery’s barbarian idiocy – proving that if Benatar was right and love is a battleground, then all you need are a chest-wig and some red leather grundies to carry the day.

8. Les Valseuses (1974)
Three may be a crowd at this time of year, but joyously amoral ruffians Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere show caring by sharing as they thieve and molest their way across France. Bertrand Bliers' reprehensible, dark, fantastically enjoyable two fingers to good behaviour features panty-sniffing, car-jacking, a gruesome gynaecological suicide, breast-milk ingestion and some of the most outrageous loon pants this side of 'Abba: The Movie'. Comic capers rub against an overarching misanthropy that renders men rutting animals and women hollow-eyed meat puppets in an endless dance of pursuit and supplication. Eerily reminiscent, then, of February 14 at your local bistrotheque.

9. Day of the Jackal (1973)
While the fastidiously-wrought, diamond-hard procedural thriller has never been a genre to scream ‘would you like to see my bedroom?’, sitting a prospective date in front of Fred Zinnerman’s exhaustive account of unyielding blond assassin Edward Fox and his attempt to ‘whack out De Gaulle’ could well be the bullet-to-the-temple that your love life has been waiting for. Sure, if either party spent a portion of their gap year as an Alsatian arms smuggler or has fine art skills that could be transferred to tampering with stolen Hawaiian passports, then there’s a chance that a modicum of amorous steam could be generated. If not, three words: Failure. To. Launch.

10. Sleeping With The Enemy (1991)
Oooh… What a shame; you were so close. Julia Roberts in a romantic thriller would seem the perfect way to engender some tense behind-the-cushion canoodling. Unfortunately, you’ve been hoodwinked by that endlessly repeated trailer of Julia playfully trying on a succession of hats to the strains of Van Morrison’s ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ and quite reasonably expected ‘Pretty Woman II’. What you have, in fact, is an unhinged potboiler masquerading as a slice of anarcho-feminism, but seen through the grimy eye of hardcore misogyny. La Roberts fakes her own death early doors; see if you last that long…

---