The Virgin Spring (1960): Arthouse does rape-revenge

The Virgin Spring (1960)
aka Jungfrukallen
dir: Ingmar Bergman

Throughout this website already, I have been cataloging the varieties of the rape-revenge genre. The movies have had different purposes: a feminist take (Descent), a desire for female agency (I Spit On Your Grave), a genderqueer primal scream (Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives), a sociopolitical teardown (The Woman), or completely exploitative desires (Thriller: A Cruel Picture). For the majority of these movies, the final goal of the film is to get to the revenge, and because rape is such a violating act, the victim is exonerated from any vengeful act they participate in, regardless of depravity of the vengeance. Descent is the obvious exception, in that Maya eventually realizes that her revenge is not as satisfying as she wants it to be.

Given the age of the above movies, one might think that rape-revenge is a rather new genre. But, the rape-revenge genre is older than old. One can look to the Roman story of Lucretia, whose rape, and subsequent suicide, led to the vengeful overthrowing of the Roman Monarchy that led to the development of the Roman Republic.

The Virgin Spring has origins in a murder-revenge ballad from 1673, Tore's Daughters in Vange. In the ballad, Tore's 3 virgin daughters were on their way to churc, when they were murdered by herdsmen, and a spring developed where they were murdered. The herdsmen continued on to Vange after the murders, and sought shelter in the home of the parents of the daughters. Upon discovering what the herdsmen had done, the father, Tore, killed the two older herdsmen. Before Tore could murder the youngest Herdsman, Tore asks their identity and discovers that the herdsmen were his sons who were returning home. So, three guys killed three virgins, who happened to be their sisters, and then were killed by their parents out of vengeance. Upon this realization, Tore asked God for forgiveness, and built a church on the site of the spring as retribution.

The Virgin Spring re-develops this framework to change it from an familial story of non-identity and murder to a rape/murder-revenge story about violation and grief. Bergman has also crafted a story of envy, religion, sin, redemption, shame, and guilt. That the story is set in medieval Sweden focuses even more of the story on the classic themes it portrays instead of trying to claim it is a story of modern sins.

Bergman opens the movie with a shot of a demonic-looking woman. She is visibly very pregnant, and she is opening up the kitchen for the day, while also praying to Odin for help in her situation. In the next scene, her family is openly worshiping a Crucifix, posing as a duality between the Christian masses and the polytheistic worshipers of the Gods of old. As soon as they finish praying, the Christians start figuratively putting more yokes on the pregnant woman, Ingeri, who is also their half-daughter and is also pregnant out of wedlock. The proceed to slut-shame her for her indiscretions, and tell her how much of a burden she is. Meanwhile, their good and blonde daughter Karin is busy sleeping away the day after dancing so long the night before. Being a maiden, she is supposed to be taking the virgin candles to the church, but she is too busy snoooozing while her mother is making excuses. After waking, and agreeing to delivering the candles, Karin demands to wear a specific dress, and also demands to have Ingeri accompany her on her journey to the church.

In the first act, Bergman has already set up Odin vs Christianity, Ingeri (sinner) vs Karin (virgin), envy, nepotism, family dedication, and the shame of out-of-wedlock pregnancy. But, Bergman has also set up the innocence and naivety of Karin as she constantly witnesses her parents' oppression of Ingeri and, feeling sympathy, wants to give support Ingeri as a human being.

Ingeri and Karin set out on their journey to the church. As they travel down the path, Ingeri pretty much calls Karin a slut for dancing with everybody the night before, and tells her that she's gonna get raped behind some bushes. Meanwhile, Karin is all "I just am asking around for your benefit, and I think that I can fight guys off."  Ingeri, frustrated that she couldn't get Karin's goat, ditches Karin and visits the cabin of Odin's real world analogue. The analogue tries to rape Ingeri, but she runs away from him and his assault.

On the other side of the narrative, Karin comes across 3 herdsmen with whom she shares the picnic which was provided to her. After eating, the herdsmen rape and murder Karin while Ingeri looks on from a cliff. At first, Ingeri looks happy that Karin is getting violated. But, as Ingeri witnesses the brutality, she starts regretting her desire for Karin to be violated. The youngest herdsman, who is just a wee child, also looks horrified at what he just witnessed.

The herdsmen take all of Ingeri's belongings, including her special dress, and make their way to the residence where we began. At first they're taken in by the family, until the herdsmen try to sell her dress for money. Upon identifying the dress as Karin's, the parents fret, grieve, prepare themselves, and then murder the highwaymen. In the end, looking upon the murdered boy herdsman, the parents start to realize what they had done. But, they have to find Karin, whose body is still in the field. Upon finding the body, the family begs forgiveness, and believes that the building of a church is the best form of atonement for the crimes they committed out of revenge.

What The Virgin Spring retains that most of the other films do not is that need for a post-revenge redemption. The Woman attempts a perverted redemption by having the Woman take one of the children as payment for the suffering inflicted on her. But, really, that isn't nearly as redemptive as the idea of doing something altruistic in a place where so much evil has been done. Building a church out of a sincere sense of self-knowledge of one's evil acts is morally redemptive, and actually builds something constructive out of the mess.

Last House on the Left, the American kind-of adaptation, eschews the rebuilding of community for a scorched earth finale. Last House attests that the situation has irrevocably changed this family, and is not interested in any guilt of the family over their revenge. But, Last House on the Left is also political in nature. Craven has argued that Last House is about the Vietnam war. And, by participating in the act of aggression and revenge, America had never apologized, and so his characters do not need to apologize.

Still, the changes of The Virgin Spring from the original ballad inform the audience that Bergman was less interested in the sordid and more interested in the morality. By not making everybody related, and removing the incest and kid-killing twist at the end of the ballad, Bergman places the focus squarely on religion and shame for the course of the movie. Even immediately after the violation, Karin is walking around shell-shocked, traumatized, and crying before she is murdered by a blow to the head. She is ashamed and violated, but is offered no chance at redemption or forgiveness.

The Virgin Spring is not graphic by today's terms, and Bergman's methodical pacing extracts the horror from the onscreen acts. The horror is replaced with a studied distance at the immorality that surrounds the piece. The multi-layered nature of the film, delving into emotions and religion among other issues, makes the film still vital. Add in a bit of shame and guilt and The Virgin Spring is still an essential entry into the rape-revenge genre.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (aka They Call Her One Eye) (1973): Rape-Revenge Goes Military

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973)
AKA They Call Her One Eye
dir: Bo Arne Vibenius

In the late '60s and early '70s, Swedish movies, especially the ones successfully imported, were considered to be more sexually explicit than American cinema. It was almost considered to be smut for people who considered themselves too classy for outright porn or sexploitation. Indeed, many of Sweden's films dealt in sexually explicit imagery that were as frank as their subject matter. Most notably in the case of I Am Curious (Yellow), a political protest movie which some states attempted to ban and which led to a movie theater being burned down due to sexually explicit material.

Sweden was also home to arthouse sweetheart Ingmar Bergman, who had made The Virgin Spring, a non-explicit rape-revenge meditation that would be remade into Wes Craven's Last House on the Left.

Combining these two extremes, as well as incorporating a militaristic fetishization, Bo Vibenius created Thriller: A Cruel Picture as an attempt to make the most commercial film ever made. Vibenius pushed the content and tone so far that he went over the edge and across the line into a deeply disturbing area that few movies reach. Thriller was one of those brutal films where the projectionists would feel free to make their own edits where they felt like the movie was too rough for their tastes.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture is still notorious for its use of hardcore pornographic sexual images, as well as an infamous eye scene, all of which are currently only used in the hardcore version of the movie. Yes, even to this day, Thriller: A Cruel Picture is censored into 2 separate versions. When first released in the US, there was an 84 minute version released as They Call Her One-Eye. When it got a 2004 DVD release, Synapse Films released two separate versions. Thriller: They Call Her One Eye (Vengeance Edition) which is 104 minutes, and Thriller: A Cruel Picture (Limited Edition) which is the full 106 minutes.

The movie itself is a violent rape-revenge fantasy that is emotionally cold and distant, but not entirely graphic in its depictions of rape, especially if you consider the extended sequences of both A Clockwork Orange and Last House on the Left. However, when he was making the movie, Vibenius added in shots of hardcore pornography into many of the sex scenes to make the movie more...marketable? At the time, in the US at least, hardcore porn was starting to take off a bit. Pornographic movies like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were making money like gangbusters. So, adding hardcore porn seemed like a good idea for this movie. But, most of the pornographic movies were not violent rape-revenge moralistic movies. The full version of Thriller: A Cruel Picture also includes a graphic, close-up, eye piercing scene, which goes even further than the eye slicing scene in Un Chien Andelou.

But, Thriller: A Cruel Picture is no Un Chien Andelou. It is also no The Virgin Spring. Thriller: A Cruel Picture is raw and made in a more exploitative tone. Thriller: A Cruel Picture is a brutal, and disturbing picture that doesn't really flinch from anything.

What is Thriller? It is the story of a girl who was raped as a child. She went mute as a result. And, then she was kidnapped on her way into the city where she was drugged, forced to take heroin, raped, stabbed in the eye, and put to work as a prostitute. She starts to gather her money. But when her prostitute friend is killed, she realizes that, without action, death would be her fate as well, and starts training with the military to learn how to drive, how to shoot, how to fight. Basically, how to become a single woman weapon. In the end, she takes bloody revenge on her clients and on her captors.

The movie is brutal. But, what's weird is the decision to include hardcore pornography. It is filmed completely out of context with the rest of the film. Vibenius intercut the hardcore scenes into the montages of sex with the johns. This choice makes those scenes feel more erotic than disturbing or exploitative, and it makes watching the scenes even more disturbing by almost getting off on the abuse of this woman. With the new sex scene, the montages with the johns stop being emotionally raw, and start evoking more complicated emtions. The effect shifts the movie from being a purely brutal movie to being a different animal of conflicting emotions. I don't know if that makes it art, or if it means it is a bad choice. One could argue that it is showing the pleasurable side of sexual abuse from the john's point of view, and that by intercutting the raw emotions of the victim with the pleasure of the abuser, Thriller is creating a morally complicated, and perhaps corrupt, viewpoint of the scene. But, whether that makes it morally bankrupt or if it makes it art is probably subjective.

The other scene that is censored is the eye gouge. But, the eye slice fits with the rest of the film. It is slow, unflinching, and squirm worthy. The audience takes no pleasure from seeing the eye gouged. I would even argue that seeing eye damage is one of the top cringe worthy body parts. As such, it would be nice to have one more version of the movie with just the porn taken out, but the eye left in.

Tarantino has gone on record loving this movie, and it is easy to see why. He also based Elle Driver on the lead character. This is a movie that plays with form and visuals while also working to disturb and form a "sex trafficking is bad" mentality. It's a necessary film\, but it is hard to actually say that it is essential viewing.

1313: Bigfoot Island (2012): Twinks in a Forest is now a genre.

1313: Bigfoot Island (2012)
dir: David DeCoteau

As a gay lover of the B-picture (and Z-picture), David DeCoteau's career has fascinated me.  When I was a wee tyke, I fell in love with a mildly craptacular movie titled Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama. It's a old 80s horror movie with Linnea Quigley about a magical imp chasing around girls in a closed bowling alley.  It's really amazing and terrible.

For the first part of DeCoteau's career, he directed a whole slew of crappy exploitation horror movies for straight audiences.  Nightmare Sisters, Beach Babes From Beyond, Test Tube Teens from the Year 2000, etc.  Most of these movies were under pseudonyms like Ellen Cabot.  In 1997, DeCoteau started coming out of the closet, and directed, under his own name, The Journey: Absolution, which is a terrible movie filled with naked women and wanton homoeroticism starring Mario Lopez, Richard Greico, and Jaime Pressley.  Oh yeah, you know you're curious now.

In 2000, he made the gay homoerotic movie that would be seen as the start of his own brand of homoerotic horror movies, Voodoo Academy.  After that, he started churning out a whole bunch of horror movies that featured hot men in speedos and terrible acting.  The Brotherhood, Wolves of Wall Street, Beastly BoyZ, and my favorite, Leeches!, among others.  And, soon after that well dried up, he started down a path of two styles.  One is the inept family friendly series that is either A [holiday] [animal], or !?!.  Such fine examples are A Talking Cat!?!, My Stepbrother is a Vampire!?!, and An Easter Bunny Puppy.  The second path is the 1313 series, which is a Warhol-esque ode to men in their underwear.

Now, none of this is actually any good.  The 1313 series is barely entertainment.  He's made 12 of them in the space of 2 years.  So, that should tell you something.  Now and then, DeCoteau is doing something interesting.  And, if you dig deep enough into Bigfoot Island, you might be able to find a kernel of something...until he kills it with a weird and misogynistic final scene.

The first hour of Bigfoot Island consists of twinks walking, running, canoeing, suntanning, and showering...frequently shirtless.  Now, that sounds like a lot of fun, usually.  But, we're talking about one-at-a-time walking, running, canoeing, suntanning, or showering.

Let's break the opening down.

The first four minutes of the movie are establishing shots, including a completely captivating shot of a car ferry deck.  No actors.  No dialogue.  3 title cards.  And all forest.

The next 4 minutes are of some shirtless twink walking.

Then we get a phone call with him saying he's early to...something.  And, he's going to help clean...once he's done with all this walking in the forest.

Then a brief shot of a girl stalking the guy and a flashback to him saying something about sugar to her.

Then back to him walking and being watched in the forest, with periodic growling.

So, now we're 13 minutes in and you're starting to wonder if this is some new fetish of a guy walking shirtless through the forest with people growling at him.  Actually...

Then you get a shot of a guy in a cheap Bigfoot suit dart past.

For another 3 minutes we get more twink walking in the forest.

So, now we're 16 minutes into a 72 minute movie.  And, it's been a twink walking, making a single phone call, a flashback about sugar, and a darting glimpse of Bigfoot.  And a lot of forest.

Finally, we get a chase sequence.

That

Lasts

For

2

More

Minutes.

And wham...Bigfoot bitchslaps the guy, and then we cut to a guy in a cabin.

18+ minutes of establishing shots and one twink walking around.  And then a bitchslap.  BAM!

And that's the summary of what you experience in 1313.  One guy takes a shower and THEN goes running with his shirt on (dude, you shower AFTER you go running).  Another guy goes canoeing (with a shirt on!), and then goes suntanning after removing his shirt.  He also gets killed by Canoe To The Head.  Then there's a bit of chase me chase me with the final two guys, the last one of which gets a little bit more off-screen mauling.  And that's the surface of the first hour.

Oh, and that girl I mentioned earlier?  She's the one summoning Bigfoot.  And, we're led to believe that this is a rape-revenge movie, without showing the original rape.  Yes, folks, this is a rape revenge movie that is included in a Bigfoot movie.

EXCEPT...

In the final scene, DeCoteau has the girl confront the shower guy, who is her friend.  And, she says that he saved her from being raped.  So, she was harassed pretty hardcore.  Apparently they were on top of her too.  And, then he rescued her.  I mean, being sexually assaulted is pretty bad, but is it Bigfoot bitchslap death to five guys bad?

And, then, to throw extra Bitches B Crazy fuel to this twist, the only way shower boy gets to live is if he stays on the island with her and abandons his school, friends, and family.  Otherwise, he'll get bitchslapped to death too.

And, that's the end.

Dread Central has a minute by minute account of the movie, and it's pretty hysterical.  Especially because I was texting with a friend while watching this, and my texts exactly mirrored his review.  "I wish this guy would die! He's kind of muscley but all he's been doing is walking for like 12 minutes."  "Oooo, we're changing it up a bit. The new guy is in a canoe now. And, he's not shirtless. He's a rebel." "Never mind. But, at least he's not walking. He's just suntanning."

Is this movie worth it?  No.  Is it saying anything?  A bit.

It may be trying to say that sexual assault is as traumatic as rape.  Or, that women are crazy.  But, is it worth it?  I dunno.  Do you like watching twinks hike silently in the woods with lush forestry?  If so, this is the movie for you!

Descent (2007): Rape-Revenge as a tone poem

Descent (2007)
dir: Talia Lugacy

Recently, I went off looking for horror movies directed by women.  Reel Grrls recommends Pet Semetary, which leads to the catalog of Mary Lambert films.  There is Stephanie Rothman, whose pre-1980 catalog will certainly get looked at here as I find copies of the movies.  Mary Harron has a couple under her belt, including last week's review American Psycho.  The Soska twins who directed American Mary, a rape-revenge movie crossed with body horror.  And, then I stumble upon Talia Lugacy's Descent.

Descent is as much a tone poem as it is a horror movie.  It attempts to explore the depths of the emotional devastation a woman suffers when she is raped and the distance she'll go through to get revenge.  Yeah, guys, this is yet another rape revenge movie...but this one is quite different.

The story of Descent is a bit different to begin with.  It's the story of Maya (Rosario Dawson), a college girl who swings both ways.  She's experimental and intellectual.  She's aloof and a little bit pointy when she talks with men.  She has men run the gamut of her brain through trials in order just to go on a date with her, nevertheless to hook up with her.  She also lets down her walls with women a lot easier than she does with men.

While at a house party, Jared (Chad Faust) forcibly hits on her until she gives in and chats with him at the party.  They hit it off enough to go on a separate date.  The date is nice, though it is a bit of an intellectual ping pong game.  Maya goes home with Jared.  He lights candles.  Puts on subtly sexy music.  And, they start making out.  Until Maya decides that she doesn't want to go all the way, and Jared date rapes her because he is too far gone.  This isn't the explicitly anti-woman rape of American Mary or I Spit On Your Grave or Victim.  Nor is this the drug-clouded crossing the line of The Skin I Live In.  This is a date rape where the lines weren't explicitly drawn prior to making out by 2 adults, and then 1 adult draws the line as the other is charging right over it.  It's still just as violating, but the situation is much more common, and risky to report.  It is all the more violating when the date rapist knows he is forcing himself on the woman and is whispering all sorts of misogynistic and racist epithets in her ear.

After Jared violates Maya, she dives into a hazy world of distanced depression, alcohol, and drugs in a hip hop club that may be kind of underground.  The details of this fall are left intentionally vague to make a more poetic universal representation of depression instead of something more explicitly plot laden.  Through this, she connects with Adrian, a DJ at the club who takes in the helpless.  Adrian is also a powerful force, as shown by some guy who worships him enough to smoke a cigarette from between his toes?  Yeah, the movie is going into D/s land here.

The movie is also exploring the racial reclamation of Maya.  In the first act, she had been the usual college girl, generally reserved to doing average white college girl things like going to white college house parties.  Or, so the Talia Lugacy wants you to think.  Apparently, house parties are only the domain of whiteness while the underground hip hop club is the essence of blackness?  Lugacy's racial politics here are exceedingly amateur, especially compared to the loving care that she puts on the feminist touches of the rape revenge portion.

During the second act, in a vague sense, Maya and Jared concoct a revenge plan on Jared, which provides the third act of the movie.  The revenge has Maya making Jared strip naked, tying him up, then violating him...and then has Adrian violate Jared as well.  This rape scene finale is over 20 minutes from strip to to end in the NC-17 edition.  Just to contrast, the rape scene in Irreversible is 9 minutes. To further contrast, Descent's first rape scene is about 10 minutes from basement wine to end, with only 3 of those being the actual rape portion.

Descent works and it doesn't.  And it doesn't work for the same reason it does.  The whole film is practically tonally flat.  From the opening scene all the way up to the strip scene, the tone and pacing of Descent remains remarkably cold and distancing.  For the middle portion of the film, this makes sense as it matches Maya's descent into depression, but the opening of the film is tonally exactly the same as the post-rape sequences, leaving an similarity that shouldn't exist.  We should feel like Maya is more in love with life before the rape than after.  Instead, it feels like she's as disaffected as she always was.

The second act also stalls almost.  The emotional descent is more of a meander in a vaguely downward direction.  Maya wanders into this club life and becomes infatuated with Adrian for some reason or another.  But, its all so vague and hazy and then there's school and work.  This feels exactly like life. The dialogue really doesn't even need to exist in this film for it to work.  You could watch this movie on mute, and it would be an even better film.  In that manner, it is a much more emotional film that tries grasping at the depression.  While the second act of the movie totally achieves the distancing emotion of post-trauma, the first act is so similar that the impact just isn't there.

Where the movie really really differs from the other rape revenge movies is that there is hardly any sexualizing of Rosario Dawson's body.  She never gets naked.  She isn't wearing slutty clothes.  She is just a woman.  Even in American Mary, Mary is frequently traipsing around in more revealing fetishwear for the camera to linger over. However, in the NC-17 edition of Descent, which is (surprisingly) streaming on Netflix, Chad Faust gets fully naked.  Fully frontal nudity.  And, Adrian is stripped halfway down his ass.  Descent allows for the sexualizing of the male body while denying the men the pleasure of sexualizing the female body.

Through the eyes of Descent, this is the first feminist rape-revenge movie that truly doesn't pander to an assumed male audience.  It violates the male, and also sexualizes the male completely.  It provides a completely different experience to the other rape-revenge movies with those changes.  But, that doesn't mean that it isn't problematic.

The main moral problem is that the movie uses homosexual acts as a punishment, thus othering the gay act even as Adrian is exclaiming that he's not a "faggot" and that he's just raping Jared as revenge. Basically, Tulia Lugacy thinks it is more OK to use homophobic epithets than it is to use racist epithets, which...ugh. Adding on top of that the D/s relationship of the foot smoker in the club, it really makes for a disappointment in the edges of the message.  Considering the innovation that Talia uses for the rest of the movie and the great pains she goes to in order to successfully desexualize the female, and exploit the male, I can't help but feel a bit hurt that she couldn't have innovated a way to not make the rape scene use so much homosexual action.

However, Descent gets the tone of the finale correct.  Even though we're not given the explicit build up, nor even an honest feeling of how Maya turns from depressed victim into vengeance seeker, the climax is astounding.  It's intimate.  Maya is excited despite herself.  Adrian, the tool of the vengeance, is eager to violate the man that violated his friend.  But, Maya has no satisfaction from the revenge.  In the end, she still is violated and has now participated in and perpetrated the violation of another human being even if that human was her violator.  With just one look, Descent calls into question the revenge based justice system that people frequently tout.  Is revenge justification enough to completely punish offenders?  Will it actually bring closure and satisfaction to the families of the victims?  Will it just compound the hurt and the anger?  Descent doesn't answer these questions, it just brings up the idea that revenge does not make everything whole again.  This same final shot is used as the final shot in Zero Dark Thirty to call into question the moral toll of torture.

Descent isn't a pleasant movie to watch, but it also isn't as raw and disturbing as other rape/revenge movies reviewed here.  It is more harrowing, and more of a tone poem than a horror movie, though it is quite horrific.  Make no mistake, it is quite explicit in the finale (though it doesn't go so far to feature actual penetration if you're looking to get your kinky jollies out on the screen).  But, the feminist changes in Descent make it an intriguing and different addition to the rape/revenge genre.

American Mary (2012): Feminism through Independence

American Mary (2012)
dir: Jen and Sylvia Soska

Last month, we had a variety of rape-revenge movies directed by men.  There was The Woman by Lucky McKee, I Spit On Your Grave by Mier Zarchi, and Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives by Israel Luna.  Ticked-Off Trannies had men either in drag or identifying as women getting raped, but the other two are women getting raped.  We explored the differences between them, and how the point of view of The Woman makes it much more problematic than I Spit On Your Grave, even if it shies away from the actual acts.

In 2012, Jen and Sylvia Soska made their second horror movie, American Mary, a rape-revenge horror movie they combined with the body horror genre, the Giallo genre, and the coming of age genre.  While the end result of this genre mashing isn't disturbing, scary or intense, it is moody, gothy, tense at times, and wholly fascinating.

American Mary refers to Mary Mason, a young medical student studying to be a surgeon of some kind. She has financial difficulties, and is targeted by her professor for various minor indiscretions, such as a phone ringing in class or missing a lecture. While the audience may think that some sort of reprimand is justified (letting your phone ring in class is just plain rude), Dr Grant seems to take special delight in making the reprimand seem personal and harsh.

In order to make ends meet, Mary applies to become a stripper, but due to a last minute circumstance, ends up performing surgery on a guy who has been tortured for whatever reason.  The motivations of a strip club owner torturing guys and removing their eyeballs is never made completely clear, but the owner says "no questions" and the movie just lets it flow.

Following this surgery, she is contacted by a stripper named Beatress, who has been getting plastic surgery to make her look like Betty Boop (if you squint your eyes).  Beatress has a friend, Ruby, who wants to be turned into a doll.  And, by "turned into a doll," Ruby wants to have her nipples and labia removed, and her vagina closed up as much as possible.  This is because Ruby wants to be idealized and not sexualized.

Meanwhile, at her residency, Mary is noted for her professional bedside manner, and is invited to a late-night after-hours party by Dr. Walsh...where she is drugged and raped (onscreen, briefly, but clothed) by Dr. Grant.  For whatever reason, she doesn't go to the cops, but drops out of med school, and decides to go into underground body modification surgery, where she eventually develops a good reputation under the name Bloody Mary.

But, first, she must exact revenge on Dr. Grant by performing her first BME surgeries (without anesthetic), including teeth filing, genital mutilation, tongue splitting, and amputation.  Weirdly, this series of surgeries happens offscreen, with a flourish of a body-mod hand drawing.

Bloody Mary becomes a bigger and bigger success in the BME community as time goes by.  She earns a reputation, and puts together a website, as well as does a series of surgeries on a pair of twins who run an influential website, or something.  The cops come snooping around the missing Dr. Grant.  But, they find nothing.

At some point, the movie mildly treads water in a reverse CSI mode, where we think the cops keep getting closer. When the movie has padded it's running time enough, it decides to kick in the finale. Finally, after all this time (which seems like weeks, if not months...especially since her reputation needed to develop), Ruby's husband sees the surgery she had, and kills Ruby, beats Beatress, and then attacks Mary, stabbing her.  But, Mary sews herself up to die of internal bleeding. Yeah, it is a bit out of the blue.

Outside of the completely left field ending, the movie is well executed and just plain moody.  It may be disturbing to people not into BME, but to those used to it, it is mainly just a picture about a girl who does surgery for awhile, with some detectives following her.  It's almost Giallo-esque, but it doesn't have the blood and gore scenes to back that up.  It's very body horror, but it rarely gets close to the surgeries to be in that horrific.  But, what it is is political.

In interviews, the Soska sisters have said that they started out as actresses where they would end up with bit parts that sounded like a Vivid resume.  Hooker #2 this, or Call Girl that. And, they wrote Dead Hooker in a Trunk to mock that.  Then, they wrote American Mary as a response to the idea that there really was no big named horror villain that was a female.  There was no real female equivalent of Jason or Freddy. And, in the vein of American Psycho, they chose to make the whole movie about the villain.

As such, they've made a movie about rape, rape culture, and feminine power in the face of it all.  While there are 5 speaking male characters, 3 are rather rapey (Billy Barker, Dr Grant and Dr Walsh) while 2 are rather nice.  And, Mary's only 2 "victims" are Dr. Grant and a security guard who comes across her and her post-surgery Dr. Grant.  Mary isn't a psychotic serial killer.  She just does body mods, and she is doing things her way.

The movie is also notable for its female point of view.  Some of the strippers who are at the club want to be strippers.  Beatress, looking like Betty Boop, seems to be making shittons of money stripping.  She is able to just randomly throw thousands of dollars on her friend's surgery ($12,200 to be exact) and provide some cocaine on top of it.  How?  I dunno!  And, the camera looks at female bodies, but is only lingering when a man is in the room.

It is all about the female perspective.

Ticked Off Trannies With Knives (2010): Tranny as Victim and Victor

Ticked Off Trannies With Knives (2010)
dir: Israel Luna

This could also be better known as Day of the Tranny.  While Ticked Off Trannies With Knives is an amazing exploitation title, Day of the Tranny would be better because a) it acknowledges the deep deep debt it owes to I Spit On Your Grave, originally titled Day of the Woman and b) it doesn't reduce the victims to mere exploitation punch-lines. While the title is certainly sensational, it also belies the actual subject of the movie, which is a rape/murder-revenge fantasy that mirrors I Spit On Your Grave in terms of its harrowing nature and its possible empowerment messaging.

I could basically just write ditto on yesterday's I Spit On Your Grave review, and it would be completely accurate.  Well, not completely.  This has a bit more style, pizzazz, and personality than I Spit On Your Grave, which works to simultaneously humanize the victims, and actually be a better movie.  Oh, and I would have to replace Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel with GLAAD.

Ticked-Off Trannies is about a group of trannies - drag queens, transvestites, or transgendered people; in this movie, its more the first two - who go off on dates with a group of bio-gendered men, only to be drugged, beaten, raped and murdered, leaving one survivor.  This survivor and two more of her friends set traps for the rapist-murderers in order to exact bloody revenge.  Much like I Spit On Your Grave, that's the thick and thin of the plot.

Because of the title, Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives received a LOT of undeserved attention for being reductive of the perils that come with being a drag queen, transvestite or transgendered person.  In real life, they usually sit on the outsides of life, and are the target of bigoted attacks or murders.  One prominent example was in the movie Paris is Burning, a documentary about the Harlem ball culture of the underground LGBTQ scene, where one of the prime subjects of the movie, Venus Xtravaganza, was found strangled underneath a bed four days after she was murdered.  This is not a punchline.

And, Ticked-Off Trannies, despite its title, does not treat this situation like a punchline.  Much like I Spit On Your Grave, this is a harrowing, gut-wrenching experience which scars your soul.  It brings attention to the situation of violence against trans people, and also alludes to the idea that there is no justice for the outsiders of the world.  Much like I Spit On Your Grave, Ticked-Off Trannies alludes to the idea that the best justice is your own justice.

Luna acknowledges his owing to the movies of the '70s, as well as his inspiration from the Rodriguez/Tarantino movie Grindhouse. He rips through this classic exploitation flick and stylizes it like it came out of the grindhouse of the '70s.  Luna does have some gags to speed the movie up, like a missing reel gag, which brings a bit of humor to make the harrowing experience a less bitter pill to swallow and make it slightly more appealing to the masses.  Slightly.

Also, like I Spit On Your Grave, the rape/murder is excruciating, but it also comes back to identity.  As a member of the LGBTQ community, I found it harrowing and easier to identify with the victims.  And, it is the victims' story.  Luna doesn't allow the rape/murder to be intentionally vicariously enjoyed. He makes it as brutal as tense as one can in a horror movie.  But, that doesn't mean it can't be enjoyed by the sick portion of the population who are determined to enjoy the torture and rape of another human being.

Is this problematic?  Again, it's up to you to decide that.  This is decidedly not a movie to encourage or make light of the violence the Ts face in everyday life.  This is a movie that brings this to attention, and doesn't even give the pat justifications of a movie like Boys Don't Cry, where the FTM transgendered person lied to everybody around her.  Ticked-Off Trannies gives a full-on exploitation experience that brings attention to the issue, and also gives a revenge fantasy when it could be needed.

And, I repeat, due to its stylization, it is less soul searing than I Spit On Your Grave, but not much isn't really.

I Spit On Your Grave (1978): Woman as Victim and Victor

I Spit On Your Grave (1978)
dir: Mier Zarchi

In 1978, a movie was self-distributed titled Day of the Woman.  Later, it was picked up for slightly wider distribution, and re-released as I Spit On Your Grave. The impact of this film was both solid and null, thanks in large part to its graphic nature. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel rallied against this movie, calling it depraved, and immoral.  They considered the violence to be purely exploitative, and just as damaging to women due to their perception of the exploitative nature of the rape.  They were wrong. Maybe.

I Spit On Your Grave is one of the most disturbing and harrowing movie experiences one could find.  I remember the first time I encountered the movie.  In my film class, we had just finished watching Last House on the Left, the old Wes Craven rape-revenge movie that Americanized and politicized Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring.  I had commented that Last House wasn't as shocking or brutal as I had been expecting, and was softened by the comic relief of the police, the hick music, and that the torture was way more psychological than I had been expecting; the result of the politicization of the subject matter.  My professor handed me a semi-bootleg of I Spit On Your Grave, and this had been the movie I had been expecting.

I Spit On Your Grave is a raw, amateur rape-revenge movie that does not flinch from nor does it glorify the act of rape.  It is a 100-minute movie, but it has no plot development beyond big city female author comes to backwoods, gets gang raped, and exacts bloody revenge.  But, the tonality of the film sets it apart from other files of its ilk, like Last House on the Left, The Accused, and Ms. 45.  

I Spit On Your Grave features a grueling and excruciating 24 minute sequence of Jennifer, the main woman, being repeatedly trapped, raped, and freed by a group of four men.  There is no soundtrack.  There is no joy in this sequence.  There are amplified volumes of the woman screaming.  There is no silly thwaping sound that would reduce the horror, or hint at any eroticism, on screen.  There are distorted close-ups of the faces of the male rapists, not distorted enough to be cartoonish, but enough to be frightening.  It is a harrowing experience from the victim's point of view.

Then, we get a bit of downtime before we get a 30 minute sequence of Jennifer ensnaring the men and then brutally murdering them.  Unlike the rape scenes, this is filled with semi-heroic imagery and are primarily from the perpetrator's point of view: that of the woman.  These are much more filled with victory and resolution than the rape, which is filled with horror and dread.

As such, I Spit On Your Grave is intended to be almost a feminist fantasy tract where it shows how brutal men are to women, and it also shows that a woman is perfectly capable of extracting her own revenge.

It's problematic in its text, but it isn't nearly as problematic as Lucky McKee's The Woman.  In The Woman, McKee is attempting to take a point of view of a judgmental third party, but mainly focuses on the "civilized" family.  We have a lot of point of view shots from both victim and aggressor.  It becomes seriously problematic in terms of how to process the crimes we are seeing on screen.  Are we supposed to be encouraging the misogynist?  Are we supposed to be empathizing with one party over another?  Only by going over the top has Lucky McKee achieved any level of distance between the viewer and the aggressor.

In I Spit On Your Grave, Zarchi never gives us the point of view of the rapist.  We never lust over Jennifer's body.  There aren't long lingering shots that romanticize the woman's body during any of the rape sequences.  These are raw and brutal acts that pierce your soul, if you're watching it right.  On the other hand, due to the nature of film, it is often a third-party camera.  There is a way, if you're sick enough, to enjoy this rape sequence for the act of rape itself.  I'm sure there are people who watch it and say "yeah, that's how it should be done" even though it is another person suffering.

Therein lies a rub.  Should an act be depicted if somebody else can get vicarious pleasure from it?  Should the depictions be more like Natural Born Killers, where we can take the viewpoint of the killers, even as Oliver Stone is trying to condemn our consumption of the act? As in Irreversible, should these brutal acts be depicted in an distant way?  Should it be more like Fight Club's final edit of Angel's face breaking, where the act happens mainly off-screen, denying the viewer any vicarious thrill from it, and leaving it to the imagination?

These are actual questions that will always be up for debate, and have answers that probably differ between people, and between acts, and between movies and intent.  But, in the case of I Spit On Your Grave, Zarchi didn't make this movie for the pleasure of showing rape.  He made it to depict a revenge fantasy.  He wanted a strong woman in it to exact her own revenge.  And, once the revenge is done, the credits roll.