I've been thinking about how much I dislike romantic movies, or movies with romantic elements, because they so often contain unfortunate portrayals of women, dating and sex. In fact, many of these so-called romantic or feminist movies I would actually consider outright horror movies, because they describe situations I'd do anything to escape. Spoilers for the movies below, of course.

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Entrapment

Investigator Virginia Baker (played by the goddess Catherine Zeta-Jones) is investigating MacDougal, a professional thief. They play a game of cat and mouse with each other, as she pretends to be another thief in order to draw him into a major art heist. Throughout the narrative, Virginia is presented as a woman with some unresolved daddy issues.

Let me point out that Sean Connery is playing MacDougal, the male lead. Predictably, even though they could develop the relationship between the leads as an unexpected father-daughter one, in which Gin is mentored in thievery by the dad she never had, the screenwriters decide to make them a romantic couple. At the time of the movie, Sean Connery was 68 and Zeta-Jones had just turned 29! This horrendous age gap is one of the worst things I've ever seen, and I've seen footage of colonoscopies performed.

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Passengers

Oh, boy. Jim Preston, a mechanical engineer enroute to Homestead II, is prematurely awoken from cryosleep by a ship malfunction. This is a problem, because the ship has 80 years to go until it reaches Homestead II and the ship's A.I, designers and crew (and writers of this piece of shit movie) are so dumb they haven't planned for this event. So Jim has no way of getting back to sleep and no way of contacting anyone for help.

He is facing a whole lifetime virtually alone on the ship. On the brink of committing suicide, he sees Aurora (like Sleeping Beauty, get it??) in her cryopod. He decides to sabotage said pod so that she will wake up and be a companion to him. He LIES to her about doing this and they eventually form a romantic connection. This is rape by fraud, my friends. At the end of the story, Aurora has the chance to go back to cryosleep but decides not to because she's got cockholm syndrome.

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Knocked Up

A woman gets drunk and has a one-night-stand with a slovenly man. She gets pregnant, and decides to keep the kid. Throughout her pregnancy, the male lead fucks up everything and anything. He is painted as the lovable protagonist while the female lead is portrayed as a horrible, high-maintenance bitch. Her behaviour is amplified via the supporting leads, a married couple in which the woman is totally humorless and the man is a long-suffering free spirit. The lead actress, Katherine Heigl commented on the horrible portrayals of women in this movie:

“It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it, on some days. I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women? Ninety-eight percent of the time it was an amazing experience, but it was hard for me to love the movie.”

Predictably, people (men) got pissy about these comments and Heigl's career circled the toilet not unlike Megan Fox's did when she called Michael Bay a nazi. (Personally, Megan Fox can call Bay whatever she wants, his movies suck and he introduces all of his female characters ass or titties first.)

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50 First Dates

A woman with an incurable form of amnesia is wooed every day by Adam Sandler. If this fate wasn't horrible enough, the movie has a truly sinister ending. Drew Barrymore's female lead wakes up to find a recording by her now-husband explaining who he is and how they have spent their lives together, falling in love every day. Apparently, they now have children. Now, the movie plays this as a romance but let's think about it.

Imagine waking up pregnant with no memory of how you got that way. Would you be too happy about that? Imagine waking up, thinking that it was a day like any other, and then suddenly enduring the pain of childbirth? This guy has totally taken advantage of a woman with literal severe brain damage. I can't imagine what compels a man to want to marry a woman who can't form new memories, but it's probably nothing good. In fact, 50 First Dates reminds me of another shitty movie/book called 'Before I Go to Sleep' which has a similar premise but at least plays the sexual and psychological coercion for horror.

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Bridget Jones' Diary

Bridget Jones has good friends, a cute flat and a nice job. Unfortunately, she's also a rampant pickmeisha which means if you watch this movie, you'll have to endure 1.5 hours of seeing a woman bumble around without a shred of dignity. This character was originally hailed as some sort of feminist answer to the shitty romcoms of the past, but, crucially, the character is obsessed with finding love. She seems to think that being single (and over 30, OMG) is the worst thing EVAR and reeks of desperation. Here's a tip, honey, men can smell desperate, and that's not a good stink to have.

Later in the movie she finds love with Colin Firth, although he pulls LVM stunt on her at the very end by walking out of her apartment without a word and forcing her to run through the snow in her panties and slippers. He then turns around and tells her he just left to buy her a new diary - couldn't he have told her that without making a scene? She kisses him, music plays, this movie is shite. This story is a modern rehashing of Pride and Prejudice, except Lizzy Bennett is a true Queen, while Bridget is a pickmeisha pretender to the throne. If you want a modern version of Pride and Prejudice, look no further than ultra-corny guilty pleasure Bride and Prejudice which features catchy (and sometimes hysterical) Bollywood dance numbers and gorgeous leads Aishwarya Rai and Martin Henderson (repping hard for us Kiwis, yeah boii).

I'm sure I can think of more examples, but this is the cream of the crap (off the top of my head). What are your FDS horror movies?