The 6 Most Accidentally Creepy Movie Romances

Hollywood is no stranger to creepy romances: We've seen movies about aliens doing it with human women, 100-year-old vampires dating high school teens and Woody Allen hooking up with young starlets, among other unlikely atrocities. And yet, somehow, the writers always find new ways to top themselves, coming up with new and more disgusting ways to creep everyone out without even meaning to.

Here are six more famous movies where the filmmakers tried to add a little romance and ended up unleashing unintentional nastiness at best, pure existential horror at worst.

#6. Source Code -- Jake Gyllenhaal Kills a Man, Then Steals His Life and Girlfriend

The Movie Romance

Source Code is about a time-altering device that can't send a person's body back, but can transport his mind. He just has to inhabit (that is, possess) the body of someone who was there.

Time travel, brought to you by math and the color blue.

So the plot is that Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) uses this device to go back and take over the body of Sean Fentress, a victim in a train bombing, and relives the last eight minutes of Sean's life over and over until he manages to catch the bomber (think Quantum Leap multiplied by Groundhog Day). In the process, Colter, wearing the body of Sean, asks out Sean's hot co-worker Christina (Michelle Monaghan), and the two live happily ever after, presumably.

Why can't Jake Gyllenhaal just travel through time like normal people?

The Creepy Implications

Except that there's one small thing Colter hasn't mentioned to Christina by the end of the movie: Namely, that the co-worker she's had a crush on for weeks is dead, and he's actually some other guy who possessed the dead dude's body.

Basically, Colter has stolen another man's life, and the end of the movie gives no indication that he'll ever tell Christina what's going on -- how could he? She'd probably just assume he had a psychotic break. This "happy ending" is actually a terrible situation for everyone involved: Colter is walking around in the body of a man he knows nothing about, and Christina is now dating a complete stranger pretending to be Sean. There's a name for that, by the way, and it's called "rape by fraud."

"We don't have those laws in the future. Uh, I mean Minnesota. Where ... I come from."

Say Colter does the right thing and stops seeing Christina -- he still has to deal with the man's other friends and family and with his job as a teacher. Colter is a soldier, so unless he's also been getting a degree in education on the side, we're pretty sure that he's about to engage in some Kindergarten Cop-style hijinks. He's going to have to fake his way through basically every interaction he has with everyone, like the guy from Memento, but with fewer tattoos.

Our finest team of mathematicians were paid to whip an intern while he calculated the film's precise genetics.

Add this to the fact that, per the movie's ending, the Source Code (the machine that allows Colter to quantum-leap into Sean's body) was actually creating alternate timelines with every attempt to save the train. This means that, in theory, an infinite number of Jake Gyllenhaals will be creeping out an infinite number of Michelle Monaghans in an infinite number of universes, forever.

#5. Blade Runner -- Harrison Ford Forces Himself on a Replicant

The Movie Romance

In the future, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is tasked with finding and killing four escaped replicants, robots that look like humans. At one point, Deckard makes out with another replicant named Rachael, and the two go off together at the end of the movie, knowing that she only has a few years left before her expiration date arrives.

"So let's get busy."

The Creepy Implications

Sure, a case could be made that Deckard macking on a robot is sorta creepy on its own, but that depends on whether you believe that Deckard himself was a replicant, and we're not going anywhere near that can of worms here. Nope, the scene where they hook up is disturbing for different reasons. Rapey reasons.

Seriously, here's the scene where Deckard makes his move on Rachael (relevant bit starts at 3:05):

Watch that scene again without the sound on and it's infinitely creepier. Deckard starts kissing Rachael and she gets up and tries to leave, but Deckard stops her, forcefully, by slamming the door shut when she opens it.

Not off to a good start here, guy.

Rachael looks worried/terrified/not in the mood for loving and backs up against the wall, but Deckard throws her against the window ...

... kisses her, and makes Rachel tell him to kiss her. She doesn't want to, but he insists.

"I'll take that borderline mental breakdown as a yes."

At no point does her expression change from worried/terrified/not in the mood for loving, despite what the romantic lighting and sexy saxophone music might trick you into thinking. And then, of course, sex ensues.

So, uh, that's rape, right? And if you think we're taking the scene out of context, it's actually even worse in context: The scene takes place immediately after Rachael suffers a massive emotional trauma -- she has just killed a replicant, found out she is one herself and learned that her entire life is a lie. Oh, and then there's the whole "I'm going to die in a couple of years" thing. It's kind of hard for her to argue with Harrison Ford's dick at that particular moment, as it would be for anyone in that situation.

You can't say no to that. Not until he puts down the gun, at least.

So for once, this is a Ridley Scott movie where the rape symbolism is represented by actual rape. We're not sure if that's better or worse.

#4. Tron: Legacy -- Flynn's Son Hooks Up With a Computer Program

The Movie Romance

Twenty-seven years after the original Tron, Flynn (Jeff Bridges) has gone missing, and his son, Sam, goes into the computer world to find him. While he's there, Sam hooks up with a hot warrior chick called Quorra and ends up bringing her into the real world.

Thankfully, we were spared a montage of her learning the wonders of pooping.

The Creepy Implications

The movie never hides the fact that Quorra may look like a human female, but she's actually a computer program. She's an ISO, a program that appeared spontaneously, but she's still a program. In other words, Sam is now dating a bunch of lines of code.

The guy is a freak.

Sure, Quorra learned a bit about the real world from Flynn (and a few books he brought with him in the '80s), but that doesn't change the fact that "she's" as human as an MP3 file. And we put "she" between quotes because the only thing that makes Quorra female is that it has a female-shaped body; in actual fact, it's just as genderless as, say, HAL 9000, or this very webpage.

And yeah, Sam manages to bring Quorra into the human world at the end of the movie, but that doesn't mean it stops being a program -- after all, when Sam himself was digitized into the computer world, he didn't stop being human (the villain realized this when Sam started bleeding). Basically, Sam has brought into the real world a sexless computer program with little understanding of how to be human or behave socially. She's as out of place here as Sam was in the land of neon bodysuits and condom helmets.

"We're gonna eat these things called habanero peppers. Just shove as many as you can at once in your face."

For the sake of argument, let's say she does become real at the end of the movie: Well, that only makes things worse. Quorra was born out of the programming created by Sam's dad, who also acted as her father figure for years, meaning that she's essentially his daughter, too. So, Sam hooked up with either a bunch of soulless lines of code or his sister.

You'd still do it, wouldn't you?

Recommended For Your Pleasure

To turn on reply notifications, click here


The Cracked Podcast


The Weekly Hit List
