Once is enough: 18 movies you'll never want to rewatch

The Lieutenant (he’s never named) is a dirty, rotten cop. To the core. Simple corruption is the least of his offenses: He sexually harasses teen girls, drinks and snorts coke in his patrol car, and sells drugs to dealers instead of turning them in as evidence. A fearless Harvey Keitel rampages through the mean streets of New York in with no remorse, stumbling around full-frontal in a prostitute’s apartment or shooting up in a crack house, until a horrific event sends him into a tailspin of Catholic guilt and compassion. It’s sex, religion, and perverted violence all rolled into one movie you’ll appreciate for Keitel’s performance but will never set eyes on twice. (For a campy good time, watch Nic Cage in Werner Herzog’s 2009 riff, Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans.)

Kim Basinger and Madonna both bailed on the title role in 1993’s , and when Sherilyn Fenn said “yes,” it essentially ended her career. This misguided psychosexual tale has Fenn playing a woman held captive by a surgeon (Julian Sands) who convinces her that he must amputate her limbs to keep her alive. We won’t reveal the big twist, but rest assured it’s just as much a reason not to rewatch this campy disaster as the scenery chewing and laughable attempts at metaphor.

No, not the fraught, Sandra Bullock of 2004 (though it too belongs on this list), but David Cronenberg’s brilliant and disturbing examination of people who get turned on by car accidents. James Spader, Holly Hunter, and Elias Koteas give new meaning to the word “autoerotic” as members of an extreme sex cult where a car wreck is the ultimate climax. Wisely, Cronenberg merely observes these characters (gay, straight, disabled, even automotive) and their motivations rather than sensationalizing them. There is no kissing and no intimacy, just a frigid dive into a world of dangerous fetishism where one’s kink could literally kill. Fascinating though all this is, we’ll put the brakes on taking a second ride.

With 2007’s , director Michael Haneke remade his own 1997 Austrian art-house film shot for shot, for those looking for double the punishment a decade later. Here we have a family (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth play the parents) off to have fun at their lake house, only to be taken hostage by two depraved reprobates who start by killing the family dog. They then spend the next 24 hours putting the family through abject hell for their own amusement, threatening them with death if they don’t follow the instructions of their brutal “games.” Haneke intended all this nastiness to be a commentary on violence in the media rather than a horror film, but if you can even sit through Funny Games once, you’ll have to be the judge of that.

While you may have watched Ponyo or Spirited Away with your kids, is a Studio Ghibli film that is 100 percent not for them. You probably won’t want to rewatch it either, despite it being widely regarded as one of the best war movies ever made. An orphaned brother and sister live through the attack on Japan in World War II and are forced to survive a scorched-earth world full of suffering and inhumanity—needless to say, it doesn’t end well (but to be fair, you know this from the outset). Rather than glamorizing war, Fireflies is a bleak commentary on how society can so abjectly fail the people it’s supposed to protect.

Abject loneliness, murder, and pedophilia–in a comedy? UNhappiness is the more apt title for Todd Solondz’s haunting (yet oddly moving) exploration of white suburban angst. follows three sisters and the deviants they’re connected to, but in an unexpectedly compassionate way. Instead of judging the characters’ actions, Solondz steps back and invites us to understand the whys of their behavior and even chuckle a bit at the darkest parts. We won’t give much of the plot away, because as reprehensibly as these people behave, Happiness is well worth the tough—if not to be repeated—watch. Just be forewarned you’ll want to take a long hot shower after you delete this from your playlist forever.

Michael Rooker stars as the titular psycho in , a low-budget crime film set in the 1980s. But Henry isn’t the only depraved miscreant here—he teams up with a degenerate named Otis (Tom Towles) who may be even worse, whether he’s molesting a corpse or raping his own sister. The story follows Henry as he wanders from murder to murder, with no threat of pursuit or law enforcement investigation, just scene after scene of squalid depravity that earned the movie a deserved X rating. As a grainy, gritty, and likely more realistic look into a serial killer’s mind than later big-budget horror films, it’s worth one watch … if you can stomach it.

We have the hype machine to thank for , a taboo-breaking B-movie horror film that became the first in a trilogy—moviegoers were both repulsed and curious about what was being touted as “100 percent medically accurate.” The plot, such as it is, revolves around a crazed surgeon who sews two American women and a Japanese man end-to-end in a sort of Nazi-inspired experiment. If that sounds hard to stomach (ahem), in the end (AHEM) it never lives up to its sadistic promises—the sewn areas are covered with gauze, and the disgusting act you’ve been waiting for is more implied than seen. All the buildup might have appealed to the morbidly curious among us, but once you know, you know. You know?