Like Teeth a few months ago, Sex and Death 101 has enough demographic-targeting salacious content to leave non-demographics squirming in their seats; and yet, like Teeth, this film also seems intent on being a cautionary tale. It’s an intriguing but oddly unsatisfying and off-putting mix.

This time around, the rather lurid setup is that Roderick Blank (anyone get the sexual puns there?) gets an email—just before his bachelor party (!!)—that contains a complete list of the women he’s ever had sex with… plus those he hasn’t yet had sex with. This leaves him with still some seventy or so coital encounters to go; there’s a bachelor party; and the movie is nearly two hours in length. Sex and nudity ensue. With a setup like that, where else, exactly, could the movie go?

The plot is complicated, however, by a vigilante serial killer nicknamed Death Nell who might be a metaphorical sister-in-arms of the vaginally dentated heroine of Teeth. Nell’s and Rod’s paths dance around each other—with commentary courtesy of a trio of metaphysical oddball angel-drone-agents—until the two finally meet over haute cuisine and a story or two at the Quality Café. Just how tasty will dessert be, do you think?

Marking the dubious reunion of Heathers star Winona Ryder and screenwriter Daniel Waters (who also directs this time out), the film is an odd, odd duck. The credit sequence is the closet thing to a French art nouveau TV advertisement since that purgatorial crab sequence in At World’s End… only this time it’s crossed with a strange version of 52 Pick-up that tells us Blank is simply going to have to play the oddly sexual hand he’s dealt. Further, Blank owns an upscale burger chain whose perky clerks remind us to have “a startling and unique day”; when he tells his fiancée about his post-party cold, uh, feet, she replies, “we are way past the point of honesty”; after she dumps him, we’re never really sure if Blank’s house is furnishing-free or not; those metaphysical Marx brothers keep coming and going; and as the less-condensed and -graphic but rather Good Luck Chuck-ish sequence of hot (and way less than hot) sexual encounters ensue, we’re left to ponder Blank’s “sacrilegious epiphany.” Yup. It’s like Outer Limits meets The Playboy Channel, just in time for Spring Break and the Girls Gone Wild bus.

If that were all there were to it, though, I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing a review.

It’s this other dimension—the one that will leave the frat boys in the audience (or the porn-hound juvenile with a DVD remote) absolutely baffled—that makes the film at least worth talking about. The Death Nell storyline, you see, brings the story squarely out of the sex-romp genre and into Serious Land. When one of the characters says, “No sex, no death,” your bumper-sticker-conditioned brain might just automatically fill in the blanks with, “Know sex, know death.” And then you’ll remember all those college lit, psych, and poetry classes in which they told you that the sexual urge is all about staving off death or obsessing over it. And you’ll go, “Ohhh… I get it now.”

When it comes down to it, you’ve got two ways to approach this movie. If you’re interested in a rather interesting look at death-with-dignity that espouses marital monogamy (with a lot of bouncing boobs and hip thrusts thrown in), you might just find these two hours amusing. If, on the other hand, the boobs and thrusting are your idea of a good main course, you’ll probably be disappointed to be left with quality-of-life musing over haute cuisine and true (but fully-clothed) love.

Sex and Death 101 is rated R for “strong sexual content and language.” Oh, yeah. Not a good choice for men struggling with pornography. And by all means, keep your kids far, far away from this one… unless you know for a fact that they’re already oversexed and might need a lesson or two about the emptiness and futility of the obsession.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of Sex and Death 101.