Braving the Bargain Bin: Sex and Death 101

Braving the Bargain Bin: Sex and Death 101

Welcome back to Braving the Bargain. Today I’m going to look at a film made by bargain bin staple, Anchor Bay Entertainment. When their sailboat logo pops onto the screen you know you’re in for something a little different. If you like horror, you know Anchor Bay.  They’ve release and distributed many cult favourites including Evil Dead, some of George A Romero’s Living Dead series, and most of Dario Argento’s filmography. So, what truly terrifying tale has been pulled off the bargain shelves? Today’s film is...

Title: Sex and Death 101(2007)
Genre: Comedy
Price: $4.89 (Future Shop)

Yes, I’m surprised too. Sex and Death 101 has more in common with gross-out comedies like American Pie than Suspiria. Writer and director, Daniel Waters, achieved cult status with his movie Heathers, and while the box quotes Harry Knowles (Ain’t It Cool News) saying “[It] left me gasping for air laughing,” I don’t see Sex and Death 101 catching on anytime soon.

Roderick Blank (The Mentalist’s Simon Baker) starts off the movie so happy he could sing (he tells us this in a voice over). He’s engaged and completely ready to get out of the dating game. Everything is perfect until an unexpected email floats into his in box. It seems the universe (more on that later) has sent him a list of everyone he has had and will ever have sex with. As any man would (so says the movie) he drops his fiancée (Modern Family’s Julie Bowen) and decides to find every name on the list, including strippers, centrefolds, and grandmothers. He has fun at first, crossing names off left and right, but it becomes hollow. Where’s the challenge? Where is the chase, if you know exactly which girl will sleep with you next? Roderick buries the list and only remembers the beginning of the next name—Dr Mir. He thinks he’s found his perfect match in Dr. Miranda Storm (Leslie Bib) but she just wants to be friends. In his frustration, he digs up the list and her name is nowhere to be found. Maybe he can cheat the system. Maybe there’s a loophole. Maybe the list is wrong. Nope. Miranda sits him down and tells him that she doesn’t feel that way about him and they’re always just going to be friends. She then slips on some broken glass and dies. He sleeps with the coroner and starts to spiral into depression as he follows the list to its conclusion.

In the horror sub-plot, a woman called Death Nell (Winona Ryder) is seducing men, having sex with them, and putting them into a coma. She leaves a feminist poem at each crime scene and has gathered following, who call her a freedom fighter for bringing down chauvinists. Halfway through the film Roderick learns her real name, and realizes she is the last name on his list (#101).

 So, where did this list come from? Roderick is taken to a bright white room and three men, Alpha, Beta, and Fred, try to explain the situation. They (they who?) have made a machine that knows everything, which glitched and sent out emails it shouldn’t have. The three god-computer minions are in charge of using the machine’s knowledge to stop bad things from happening and are called in to find Death Nell. They tell Roderick to stay away, not sleep with the twenty women on his list between his current count and Nell, and wait for them to fix everything. Of course, Roderick decides to meet his fate and finds Nell on his own. I hate it when reviews spoil the ending. Even if the movie is bad, people want to find out for themselves and make their own decisions. My taste isn’t your taste.  However, there are only three possible ways for this movie to end.

1.      Roderick finds Death Nell, sleeps with her, and she kills him for his egotism, chauvinism, and repulsive behaviour towards women through most of the film.

2.      Roderick finds Death Nell, sleeps with her, and she triesto kill him, but he tells her that he has learned his lesson and convinces her that he’ll change his ways. She is arrested and Roderick goes back to his original fiancé having learned an important lesson about life.

3.      Roderick finds Death Nell, and they have dinner at a diner. She inexplicably trusts him, tells him her life story and explains her reasons for becoming Death Nell.  He tells her about the list and the god-machine and they decide to make a coma pact (They will take the pills she uses to put her victims in comas at the same time). Instead, they go back to her place, have sex, get married, have a baby, and live happily ever after.

This movie is not good. If you’re going to make a raunchy sex-comedy that’s mildly offensive to both men and women, you have to have a likeable lead character. Roderick Blank isn’t. He tells us he is, over and over, as he narrates his exploits. He says he’s just doing what anyone would do and really just wants a marriage and a family. He can say whatever he wants but nothing he does makes me care. You can do hound-dog with a heart of gold, but Simon Baker doesn’t come close to pulling it off.  His suave is creepy and his sweet is dishonest. If the lead had any natural charisma you maybe understand why all these women were swept off their feet. Baker was trying and that’s the problem. You could tell he was trying.

I can forgive the basic idiocy of the plot but at times it’s just inexcusable. He has twenty women left on his list the week before the machine can catch Nell. If he can stay celibate for one week his life will no longer be in danger. A sensible movie might have lowered the number to raise the tension and have him meet an old flame that never quite worked out (with a changed last name so he didn’t recognize it on the list of course). Nope. This movie takes the high road and has Roderick raped by a bus load of eighteen-year-old catholic school girls. Between that, the tired accidentally-screwed-your-grandmother-in-the-dark trope, and the uncharacteristic attempted necrophilia, I can, with great pleasure tell you my verdict.

Final Verdict...Coaster