Despite this, Sex and Death 101 is a potential undiscovered gem. It’s an oddity that sits between easy genre pigeonholing. It starts out seeming like a frat boy comedy – maybe the nearest equivalent might be something like Tomcats (2001) – about a guy boasting/telling anecdotes about all the women he has laid. Certainly, the script trots out a few lines that make you think its focus is well into this territory – women referred to as ‘bitches’ or ‘femi-nazis’, for instance. On the other hand, Daniel Waters seems to be serving up this kind of frat boy comedy with wryly self-aware trimmings of 1990s metrosexual style. Some of the encounters are amusing – notably a darkly funny (if predictable) one where Simon Baker ends up in the wrong bedroom in the dark and realizes in the morning that he has slept with Sophie Monk’s grandmother rather than her. Waters is considerably aided by lead actor Simon Baker, who has a lightweight role but delivers it with a great deal of handsome charisma.

And Sex and Death 101 soon confounds expectations. What starts out as a frat boy comedy evolves into an altogether different beast. Daniel Waters throws up some very nice pieces of writing – like the scene where Julie Benz walks out on Simon Baker and stops at the door with a beautiful little speech about how if she meant anything to him he would come and stop her. The film reaches a positively fascinating ending where [PLOT SPOILERS] Simon Baker sits down with #101 Winona Ryder, resigned to his fate and both of them knowing what it means. She tells her story that turns into a peculiar anti-fairytale wherein she becomes like a reverse version of Snow White, killing people to do good. This is Winona Ryder having smartly reincarnated herself as a Goth princess, returning to the type of role she first came to attention with in Beetlejuice (1988). The film arrives at an interesting ending where the two of them take suicide pills together before a cop-out ending that oddly enough works where they go onto a happy life together.

One of the more amusing things about the film is the names of the various women on the list. Here Daniel Waters has clearly included a list of characters from his own screenplays and favourite films. Names spotted include:- Selena Kyle aka Cat Woman, who was of course the central character in Waters’ Batman Returns script; Lenina Huxley who was Sandra Bullock’s character in Waters’ Demolition Man screenplay; Minerva Mayflower, Sandra Bernhard’s character in Hudson Hawk; Zuzu Petals, a character in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane; Bambi Kidd and Thumper Witt, named after the duo of female acrobats in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever (1971) and given the surnames of the duo of male assassins in the same film; Alexis DeLarge, a feminised version of Malcolm McDowall’s anti-hero in A Clockwork Orange (1971); a Barbarella Pygar after Jane Fonda’s heroine and her angel lover in Barbarella (1968); a Constance Cummings after the actress of the 1930s and 40s; Rachel Owlglass, a character in Thomas Pynchon’s novel V. (1963); Artemis Gordon, after Ross Martin’s master of disguise in tv’s The Wild, Wild West (1965-9); Vivian Darkbloom and Mona Farlow, after characters in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955); Carlotta Valdes, the woman Kim Novak believes herself to be the reincarnation of in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958); Ethel Walters after the famous jazz singer; while Winona Ryder’s Gillian De Raisx is named after Gilles De Rais, a 15th Century French serial killer and companion of Joan of Arc.