Movie titles I can't believe they still use

Okay, most movie titles only actually get used once, or at most, a half dozen times.

But titles like the movie I saw last night should have been played out 25 years ago.

That was Fatal Affair, and it's only the third movie I have given a 1/10 since I started reviewing movies for ReelGood back at the end of 2014. (The other two were Yoga Hosers and Transformers: The Last Knight.) You can read all the bile I spewed at it here.

It reminds me of the actual parody movie made by the late great Carl Reiner, which was called Fatal Instinct, and was an obvious hybrid of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. That parody was made in 1993, which gives you some idea how long ago these types of titles were already considered ridiculous. Unfortunately, Fatal Affair is not a parody. It's just about as earnest as they come.

(R.I.P. Mr. Reiner. I'm sorry you are not getting your own "in memoriam" post from me. You certainly deserve one.)

If Fatal Affair were a one-off, I could see it just being a mistake somebody made. But it seems like movies with these titles might be making a comeback, or at least, somebody thinks they could be, enough to greenlight similar titles into the marketplace.

Earlier this year I considered reviewing another Netflix movie called Dangerous Lies. Here's the poster for that:

I would have actually reviewed it except that Netflix or other sources were releasing other movies I was reviewing around the same time, and since I typically don't exceed more than three per week (and no longer think a movie is "fresh enough" to review if I don't get to it within the first week to ten days), it slipped through the cracks.

I don't know whether it also would have warranted a 1/10, but the title certainly does. How on earth would you expect to remember what this movie was about three weeks after seeing it, let alone three years?

But we're still not done.

In researching my review of Fatal Affair, I determined that its director, Peter Sullivan, directed a similar erotic thriller that came to Netflix just last year. Here is the poster for that one:

Secret Obsession? Are you kidding me?

If the erotic thriller itself were not enough of an anachronism in 2020, you'd think that titles as generic and forgettable as this would be.

I really hope it's not ushering in a full-on 90's nostalgia wave. I'm sure 90's nostalgia is already here in some respects, though I haven't fully noticed it yet. But maybe I'm starting to.

It's not like I don't want to remember the 90's -- I really liked that decade. I was in college. Clinton was president for most of it.

But if this is what the 90's have to offer to us in terms of nostalgia ... well, I'll take the 80's any day instead.