I have a miserable song in my head today, and it’s Ivan Reitman’s fault.

Now I don’t want to pick on the once-prolific comedy director too much; the dude hasn’t shot a watchable movie since 1993 so I’m not one to give him a kick. But I would like to take one of Reitman’s movies and illustrate what I think is a pretty unfortunate use of a soundtrack pop song - and how that song can potentially wreck a given film’s legacy.

I’m not even sure where I was recently - at Wal-Mart? the mechanic’s? standing in line at Quiznos on Triple Meat Thursday? - when this song played over the muzak, and has since been running through my head on a loop of insanity throughout my waking hours. I’d have to do some research, but I’m pretty sure that Ted Bundy was a perfectly well-adjusted young man until this song got lodged in his suddenly murderous psyche.

The movie is this:

And the song goes like this:

‘Cos I wanna be good for you
I didn’t mean to be bad
But darlin’ I’m still the best
That you ever had
Just give me a chance
To let me show you how much
I wanna give you my love touch
love touch

For the most part, Legal Eagles is a decent movie, a fun distraction. It’s Redford at his most frivolous, rakish and charming. Debra Winger at the height of her popularity. Daryl Hannah doing…well, that Daryl Hannah thing. And the movie includes at least one escape-by-forklift, which simply can’t be a bad thing.

But I remember sitting in the theater watching this movie, feeling pretty good about life in general, and when the closing credits came up with Rod Stewart warbling about how much I needed his “love touch”, the entire experience exploded.

Now you can go ahead and make your case that there are far more grievous assaults on cinema’s use of pop music, because there are plenty to choose from. “Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” from Armageddon; “She’s Like the Wind” from Dirty Dancing (a song that my college restaurant coworkers and I revised to - naturally - “She Passes Wind”); pretty much anything by Celine Dion - all of these are affronts to the excellent history of movie music.

But the key difference in those cases is that those songs - as miserable as they may be - at least appeared to have some relevance to the movie’s story. Rod Stewart’s song seems to have come at an important milestone in his career, wedged between the softcore fantasy songs of my youth (”Kick off your shoes and sit right down/Loosen off that pretty French gown”) and the slushy, cloying dreck of later years (”There’s a love that’s divine/and it’s yours and it’s mine like the sun”). But Stewart’s “Love Touch” is a special case, an extraordinary abuse of movie-watchers’ goodwill and patience. Obscenely catchy and miserably annoying, the song’s ultimate sin is that its use in the movie is so pointless, so shoe-horned in as if an afterthought, that it actually damages the movie.

And I’m being serious. I remember leaving the theater feeling worse about Legal Eagles as a whole, simply because of that song. I’ve never watched it since, have barely thought about it, and am convinced that it was a terrible movie to begin with. It may be faulty memory or it may simply be good analytical skills, but the movie’s failure in my mind is entirely due to Rod Stewart’s lazy, boring, aim-for-the-middle effort.

Which has now been running through my head for about three days. Please, if you happen to see me walking down the street, I beg you: deliver a punishing blow to the back of my skull.

Better still, leave a comment with the lyrics to the movie pop song you love - or hate - the most, in the hopes that it’ll help purge “Love Touch” out of my head for good.