Bad movies and the people who love them

The movie date is an integral facet of American youth, at least if you take your social cues from pop culture. We learned from Sandy and Danny that drive-ins are for groping (and introspective singing), from Jerry Seinfeld that you don't makeout during Schindler's List, from Zack Morris that if things go wrong with a girl, she will, without a doubt, dump popcorn on your head.

With these cultural examples planted firmly in our impressionable little teenage psyches, we head out to the Cineplex to forge social bonds and maybe, just maybe, get laid. (Why else did anyone see Pearl Harbor?) And it's a pretty good system, ensuring that hermits, the hideously scarred, and genuine movie geeks alike can experience human interaction without having to make conversation or even turn on the lights.

Unfortunately, no amount of mass-media tutelage prepares us for the exercise in sheer sadomasochism that is the Bad Movie Date.

Bad Movie Dates are not movie dates gone wrong. Nor do they simply imply that the movie in question is depressingly mediocre, like

The Break Up or any pseudo-psychological Japanese horror remakes with big-eyed children.

No, a Bad Movie Date is a deliberate attempt to bore, horrify or perhaps even drive that special someone to suicide with cinematic trash. Less Children of Men, more Children of the Corn IV.

Sadly, Bad Movie Dates are rarely attempted. They're certainly not for the faint of heart (or stomach, if your weapon of choice is John Carpenter or Eighties-era Peter Jackson).

A recent outing to BU Central's second annual Bad Movie Lock-In proved this sad thesis. While the crowd for the three previously-unannounced movies-From Justin to Kelly, Glitter and Gigli rounded out an amazing line-up of divaliscious self-destruction-drew a respectable number of nerdy freshman girls, couples were few and far between. How could this be? The Bad Movie Date is such a perfect opportunity for hooking up!

For starters, the general awkwardness of a first or second date is easily deflected onto the embarrassment of watching Ben Affleck attempt to emote. Nothing beats laughter at the expense of others.

A Bad Movie also allows you to size up your date's basic intelligence. If you've mistakenly ended up with Painfully Obvious Girl ("This dialogue is, like, sooo bad") or Unnecessarily Profane Guy (insert objectifying, off-topic outburst about J-Lo's posterior here), nothing will bring out their mental ineptitude quite like a movie that demands commentary. Hey, we can't all be Mystery Science Theater 3000.

But more than that, a particularly horrible movie -- a wow-this-is-worse-than-Battlefield-Earth bad can help you identify your soul mate. Just like snowflakes or fingerprints or fetishes, no two bad-movie obsessions are the same. If you find that girl who loves poorly dubbed Japanese ninja flicks, or the guy who will stomach the softcore incest porn that passes for French art-house cinema at your local Blockbuster, you've found a keeper.

Now that Valentine's Day is over, we can all breathe a big collective sigh of relief and go back to mediocre, mildly boring, dating. However, maybe it's these painful dates that say the most about the people we love, (or even just tolerate). The stuffed animals and jewelry and pricey dinners of February 14 may already be a faint memory, but Bad Movies are forever.