10 Alternative Films For Valentine's Day

Thanks to Fifty Shades Of Grey, the idea of what constitutes a romantic movie for Valentine’s Day has shifted from Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson meeting at a railway station in Brief Encounter to two Razzie Award nominees indulging their S&M fantasies every few minutes.

In this spirit, it’s possible to look back and find several movies whose emphasis upon exploitation rather than romance makes them perfect Valentine fare for our cracked and twisted present. Who needs poignancy when you can have sadism, lust and gratuitous nudity?

Fortunately, Hollywood has no shortage of sleazy pictures in its vaults and though they may lack the production polish of the Fifty Shades franchise, they come closer to fulfilling an audience’s idea of filmed entertainment.

We are talking fast and cheap B movies built for one purpose (putting rubes in seats), but unlike their modern counterparts they got the job done in ninety minutes or less without a lot of talk.

See for yourself.

Made for peanuts and running a slender 75 minutes, Nekromantic uses the taboo subject of necrophilia for a profound discussion of the relationship between love, sex and death.

Well, that’s what director Jorg Buttgereit would like you to believe. Not only is his debut feature hard on the eyes (it was shot on Super 8, then blown up to 16mm), but its boy-girl-corpse storyline serves a single purpose: grossing out the audience. It worked, and the film is currently banned in Iceland, Norway, Malaysia and Singapore.

Nekromantic was unavailable in the UK until November 2014, when Arrow Films was finally granted an “18” certificate, so now you can finally see what all the fuss was about. Or you can watch another movie, something without murky cinematography, bad acting and unconvincing effects. It’s your dime.