Score! (1973): Porno Chic Brings Everybody Together

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Coffy (1973): Saving the Neighborhood is Woman's Work

Coffy (1973)
dir: Jack Hill

While the white cinema of the 1970s largely pitted itself against strong female characters and feminism, the blaxploitation genre was starting to give women more opportunity to be strong, forceful characters involved in saving their community. Pam Grier became one of the icons of female power through her work as the leading lady in movies such as Foxy Brown, Friday Foster, and Black Mama, White Mama.

Coffy, however, was her first dive as the black hero of the black community, setting her up against a white power structure intent on enslaving the black community through the use of drugs. As the titular hero, Coffy is a strong female nurse whose little sister got hooked on smack, and ended up insane in the hospital and seemingly permanently damaged. In order to exact revenge for her sister, as well as an attempt to stop the system keeping the black community down, Coffy fights and kills her way up the chain, and even ties it to city councilmen.

Coffy was written and directed by Jack Hill, a white man working in the exploitation idiom. With Coffy, Hill made his first step into the blaxploitation genre which had already had strong footholds in the culture by 1973. Hill was also attempting to make a socially conscious exploitation film which wasn't just about fighting power structures for T&A and violence.

Looking at the other exploitation films that came out around this time, Coffy was downright revolutionary and progressive in terms of its attitude toward women. Black women, mainly. The black women in the movie are largely women in charge or with power. Obviously, there's Coffy. But, an early confrontation with a prostitute shows the prostitute now being pimped out by a black woman named Harriet.

On the other hand, white women are shown as being generally complacent in their own prostitution, and even territorial about their pimps and business. Almost all of the men, black or white, are shown to be corrupt figures whether they're straight our gangsters, or politicians and cops. Only one cop escapes the sour bitterness of white power corruption, and that's Carter, a cop who gets badly beaten early in the film when he tries to expose his partner as being corrupt. Of course, there are minor non-speaking characters that populate the sides of the film, suggesting that not everybody is corrupt.The doctors and nurses in the hospital, for instance, are men and women who are trying to suffer their way through doing good work.

Other, more articulate and better versed articles, outline the film's feminism, and the problems that it creates through its cat fights and brutalizing of female prostitutes. Even the earlier mentioned white prostitute who helps Coffy is beaten first by Coffy then by her pimp, and Coffy shows no remorse because the prostitute had a chance to get clean and didn't take it.

What bringing Coffy into this week's discussion does do is show that not all movies were nearly as troubling towards women's lib, and some people were listening. Unfortunately, as feminism got stronger, for awhile, so did the cinematic actions taken against feminism. Then, the men started perverting the female power struggle to make women the villains. In modern times, finding a strong female role in genre films is still tough, and mainly delegated to group ensemble pieces, or Angelina Jolie films. Even Michelle Rodriguez gets thrown into the ensemble picture category far too often for her own good.

If you're looking for a strong female action heroine who doesn't fade away into a group ensemble, your choices are still quite limited. However, Coffy is still one of the more stylish films from the exploitation genre that actually may fill your needs. Sure, it's problematic, and there may be a few too many ripping off of women's tops in the cat fights (didn't I say it was problematic?), but it isn't rape-infested, and it makes some compelling points about the invasion of drugs into the black community (and I'm not talking about the white power structure that Hill claims is behind it all).

Required Viewing.

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973): Beware of the Sexy Feminists!

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)
dir: Denis Sanders
wr: Nicholas Meyer

It's well known that men had a problem with feminism through the 70s, into the 80s and beyond. In cinematic representations, feminists were frequently portrayed as purposeless women who were hellbent on destroying families and killing men in order to achieve their silly little quest for equality...that is, if equality was ever mentioned, as most men couldn't wrap their heads around that.

Invasion of the Bee Girls is one of the primary movies about feminism, especially in terms of the sexual revolution. But, strangely, Bee Girls ends up almost being a meta version of an ultra-feminist screed.

The concept of Invasion of the Bee Girls is exploitatively simplistic. Men are being found dead from congestive heart failure due to sexual exhaustion. Through investigation, a federal investigator discovers that the scientists at the nearby research facility are sexual freaks, and that one woman has decided to merge women with bees through radiation for...whatever reason.

What Denis Sanders and Nicholas Meyer are hinting at, on the surface, is that women are the seducers, and that they're out to destroy men. The bee girls, who always wear Jackie O glasses to hide their compound eyes, are the new sexually free women who are perfectly OK with fucking men, and are actually sexually aggressors. The conversion process of the bee girls involves a lesbionic ritual of rampant nudity, breast rubbing, a white frosting covering and bees. They're practically hinting that sexually free women who want to fuck men are lesbians who just are out to kill men. The end of the movie is a big destruction of the bee girl transformation plant, killing all of the bee girls including the lead scientist bee girl. The federal investigator then takes his girlfriend, ignores everything she says, and flings her on the bed as a sex object.

As a movie from 1973, Invasion of the Bee Girls actually may be espousing some radical tenements. One of the scientists has a secret sex room behind his office that has doves or lovebirds (who has birds in their sex room?!), leather accouterments, a fish tank and a bed. That scientist is also gay, and has a secret lover. All of the other scientists are having litanies of after-hours affairs with anything that moves, and lying to their spouses about where they are.

Of course, it takes two to tango. But, finally, the women are starting to kill the men through sexual exhaustion. A lot of the women are scorned lovers or women who have otherwise been hurt. The men, actually, do a lot of hurting by constantly lying to women, treating them like objects, loudly pronouncing some as "iceburgs" and crowing about their sexual conquests. Not to mention the mid-movie sexual assault, that's about to lead to gang rape, in order for the men to take their revenge on an innocent woman.

Is Invasion of the Bee Girls truly an anti-feminist screed, if it has all of these terrible male behaviors which are frequently used as a reason for women to become feminists? Is it actually saying that raping women is a reason to become a feminist, or that it is a legitimate form of keeping women in line? Is Invasion of the Bee Girls presenting the double standard of freaky-deaky scientists to the sexy-wanting bee girls as a way of exposing the double standard in the hope that somebody will read the subtext? Or, is it completely condemning the feminists, especially given its celebration of the eradication of sexually forward women?

This is written by Nicholas Meyer, who, at the time, wanted his name taken off the film for currently unknown reasons (Meyer, write me!). Sci-fi fans will know Meyer from the films Time After Time, Star Trek II, IV, and VI, and The Day After. Was Meyer originally sending up the male-dominated society of double standards and almost making the men the villains? It's still in the movie a bit. Or, was Meyer actually damning the women, but the filmmakers decided to also damn the men as well?

While Invasion of the Bee Girls is hard to read from 41 years later, it doesn't make it any less fun At 85 minutes, Sanders keeps Bee Girls crackling, with new bizarre events happening with regularity. It's a zippy, hilarious almost-send-up of the sexploitation genre that had been bubbling at the time. Hell, even the theme is cracked and seems to be the launching pad for the theme of The Sinful Dwarf. If you want something that kind of makes you wonder about the politics behind the camera because the politics in front are so cracked, and also want a bit of sexy girls on top of it, Invasion of the Bee Girls may be straight up your alley.

Female Vampire (1973)

Female Vampire (1973)
dir: Jesus Franco

Jesus Franco was, at one point, king of the low-rent Spanish erotic horror genre. He created films that combined eroticized females and supernatural elements, mostly to craft an atmospheric mood piece with a lot of breasts in it. Some of Franco's movie are coherent movies, some are pieces of incoherent psychedelia, and some are pure softcore exploitation films.

Female Vampire exists as three versions. An R-rated horror movie, an X-rated softcore edition, and a XXX hardcore version. Somewhat surprisingly, the softcore version of Female Vampire has made it to DVD and to Netflix under the title Female Vampire, while the hardcore version still is out of print. But, really, what would Female Vampire be without the softcore sex? A 30-minute shorter movie about a vampiress who is stalking some European town.

What Female Vampire actually is about is a mute vampiress who is a descendant of Dracula, who kills people by giving them orgasms through oral sex. It could be man or woman, but she drinks their sexual essence and ultimately they die in the midst of their orgasms. Le Petit Mort becomes Le Grand mort. There are also some people hunting her, but that's mildly incoherent as it never really sticks to any of these storylines.

The story isn't what makes Female Vampire so good. I mean, it has something to do with it. But, the true qualities of Female Vampire are in the details. Franco is fascinated by the female body, as he is in every one of his other films. His camera leers over the female body in the most hilariously perverse ways. The opening credits play over our female vampire walking naked, save for a cape, belt and go go boots, in a forest. She stops, and the camera zooms in to give full screen breasts, bush, lips, and pans slowly up and down her body. Then, she walks into the camera, hitting it with her face.

The next scene, she walks into somebody's backyard, whose response to seeing a naked mute woman is "Can I help you? What do you want?" Of course, then she gives him a blowjob and kills him, after which she flies away by flapping her arms to transform into a bat, which, by the way, you never see. The closest you get to seeing a bad is an awesome bat ornament on a fancy car whose wings flap as you drive. I WANT THAT HOOD ORNAMENT.

Along the way, the vampiress, who is a mute, is interviewed by a woman and then kills her by oral sex. She also violates a bed and a headboard pillow. She writhes around in a bathtub full of bloody water. The fabrics are all in the ornate rococo gothic styles that one associates with European castles. Yet, she frequently has those moon boots that were so prevalent in the 1960s.

The voiceovers during the flying bat ornament scenes express a melancholy debate over how she is cursed to love people even though she will kill them, which is re-emphasized by the somewhat solemn elevator muzak that is in every Eurotrashy '70s sleazy film. Female Vampire has this heightened feeling of regret for the sex that it indulges in, but it actually is to just give the whole affair a bit of class, and actually succeed in taking the edge off what would be a women kill through sexuality plot.

Jesus Franco has never really cared much about anything other than leering over the female body. And, it shows in Female Vampire. But, it is so much fun for indulging in all of the cliches that you would expect from a 1970s eurotrashy film. Sultry voiceovers, moustache trimming, rococo fabrics, bad lighting, terrible focus, extreme closeups, 1970s era bush, soft muzak, and hilariously ornate details. As long as you don't take Female Vampire seriously, it is a serious load of fun.

Theatre of Blood (1973): Using the Stage for Revenge

Theatre of Blood (1973)
dir: Douglas Hickox

Rarely has a b-movie had such a high intellectual price of entry. This movie is custom made for fans of Shakespeare who also really like Vincent Price, and bloody low-budget horror movies. Given the amount of death in Shakespeare's tragedies, one might think that this has some crossovers.

Vincent Price is Edward Lionheart, a terrible Shakespearean actor who held a final season of Shakespearean tragedies, in which he played the lead and was panned for all of his performances. At some pre-film awards ceremony, he expected to get a "Critic's Choice Award," but was humiliated instead, and subsequently attempts suicide. He survives to exact his revenge on the ones who deserve it most: the critics. He starts killing the critics using the methods of various Shakespearean plays in the order he performed them in his last season. During the sequences, he also performs the choice speeches that surround the murder.

In order to fully appreciate this movie, it helps to have a cursory knowledge of Shakespeare. And, by cursory, I mean, knowledge of no less than 8 Shakespearean plays: Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline, Henry VI Part 1, Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, Othello and Titus Andronicus.

Why do you need all of this knowledge? Because the death scenes are made into absurdist weird set pieces that seem like obscure oblique ways to kill people without any knowledge of their actual origins. Even with the knowledge of their origins, but without knowing the actual plays, the scenes are still rampant odes to some of the most famous scenes, and some of the least famous scenes, in Shakespeare with the dialogue stolen wholesale from the plays.

I can't imagine people who don't enjoy Shakespeare finding much enjoyment out of this movie. It seems like a prank in order to get you to eat your vegetables. If you find Shakespearean language dense and impenetrable, especially when parceled out at a spoken speed, you'll probably hate this.

Those who have studied Shakespeare sometimes are appalled by the sheer amount of violence in Shakespeare's plays, and this isn't for them either. The horror-comedy tropes are in full spectacle here, using and abusing all of Shakespeare's most violent tendencies.

But, for the crossover market, this is a perfect evisceration of both the supposed politeness of Shakespeare, and also a way to watch people get their secret jollies out on screen. Shakespeare was never polite. He was always just dense. But, his plays were always brutal.

But, then there's the second half of this movie, which is watching Vincent Price murder all of his critics who were so hoity-toity they couldn't appreciate him in the likes of The Abominable Dr. Phibes, or Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, just to name a couple of his then-recent films. And, as such, he was going to hoist them on their own petard, so to speak. If it's Shakespeare they want, it's Shakespeare they'll get!!!

Plus, he always wanted to do Shakespeare, and he got to chew the scenery as he always loved to do and was so good at. But, that almost takes backseat to getting revenge on the critics for their need for high culture in film.

Will you enjoy it? Do you like Shakespeare and b-horrors? It's the most fun you can have watching Vincent Price, unless you don't get Shakespeare. And, that can be a high price of admission for many people. If you have that, it is amazing.

The Holy Mountain (1973): Religion is corrupt

The Holy Mountain (1973)
dir: Alejandro Jodorowsky

In the world of film, frequently once you unleash your work of art into the world, it no longer becomes your own. Especially if you're trafficking in spiritual and symbolic cinema where the viewer can, or must, inject himself and his own interpretations in order to fill in the gaps where his knowledge is lacking. The Holy Mountain, is probably one of the most symbolic and esoteric films unleashed onto a largely Christian public.

One of my first reviews explored the post-1969 world of spirituality through the documentary The Source Family, wherein a group of spiritual seekers formed around a patriarchal figure who formed his own makeshift religion out of common sense, and various other spiritualities including Paganism, Christianity, Buddhism, and almost anything you can imagine. Father Yod created an ur-religion to enlighten his flock, in a way.

Jodorowski's The Holy Mountain is about the quest for enlightenment and the Ultimate Truths of the universe. It is a satire, a quest, and a bit of snark all at once. It's weird, often visually stunning, and just a general freakout that was unleashed on the midnight crowds in the 1970s.

The Holy Mountain is actually divided into five acts. Act 1: History. Act 2: Trials of the Thief. Act 3: Current Events. Act 4: Death/Rebirth. Act 5: Quest. Each act is told in over-the-top symbolism, and each has its own brutality.

In Act 1, we follow the Thief (who can also be seen as The Fool), as he wanders through a Mexican town, accompanied by his partner, a midget with no hands or feet. They try to gather money by hook or by crook, and see a whole lot of symbolic gestures through their journeys. First they see the Pagan Mexico. Then, they wander upon a Frog and Salamander show called The Conquest of Mexico, in which Ancient Mexico is bombed and murdered and taken over by the Romans. The Romans then bring Catholicism to hock at Mexico, who buy into it in hoards. The Thief tried to get in on the action, and, already resembling other forms of Jesus, makes a figure of himself, and sells himself as crucifixes. But, he is rejected.  Upon rejection, he happens on a tall red obelisk, from which a large hook with gold comes down, and he decides to go up to see what is up there.

In Act 2, The Thief, now in the obelisk, meets The Alchemist. After dueling the alchemist, the alchemist cleanses the Thief, then turns the Thief's excrement into gold, and tells the Thief that he is excrement but can be turned into gold. Then he begins to train the Thief to become his second assistant.

Act 3 introduces The Thief, and the Audience, to a group of 7 different power players on Earth currently. Each is represented by a planet, and each represents the worst impulses of the world. There is an arms dealer, a kids war toys manufacturer, a sex artist, a government financier, a police chief, a cosmetics and mattress manufacturer, and an architect. Each are uniquely selfish, self-centered, and willing to sell out the world in order to make themselves a buck. Money rules almost every one of these power players.

Act 4 is all the trials of the whole group must go through before they can think about climbing the Holy Mountain. First they must abandon their worldly goods. Then, they must abandon their self. Then, they get steadily stripped down through a variety of chemicals and go through a death and rebirth sequence through which they can obtain a more pure sense of self.

Act 5 is the journey to the top of the mountain. They first go to Lotus Island. They start to get sidetracked at the Pantheon Bar, but reject that carnal sensibility. They must move on to achieve enlightenment. They begin their ascent, where they go through a trial of their fears, like lying naked with a bunch of tarantulas on your body!!!  OMG. And, finally, they reach the summit. The thief, however, is dismissed to be the next trainer at the top of the obelisk and gets a prostitute and monkey as a consolation prize. He finds eternity through love and not enlightenment. Which is OK, because it was all a strange sham anyways. When the rest of the group reach the top table, where they are supposed to duel the immortals, they find the immortals are dummies. The alchemist reveals that this is all a movie anyways, and true enlightenment must be found on your own. And there is real life outside of the movie screen. Go find it.

But, through that, there is a weird undercurrent of distrust of spirituality. The finale is a gimmick that is meant to not answer the big questions because that answer is always personal, but what of the group that is formed? It is formed of the worst people of society. Is it saying that anybody through giving of themselves can find spirituality once they abandon Earthly goods? Does this alleviate any of the wrong-doing they have set in motion? Is religion just as much an easy answer as, say, stopping at the Pantheon Bar?

And, Jodorowsky is also criticizing the hedonistic hippies even more than he is criticizing religion. At least the pagan spiritual religion that the movie is based in gets a fair shake. But, the druggie hippies who spout that enlightment can be found solely through a drug are shown to be idiots that should be ignored. As such, he is saying that they don't really believe that they've found spirituality, even though they claim to. They've just found a distraction. At the bar.

So, what is pure in The Holy Mountain? Is anything pure? Is anything worthwhile? Is the search for enlightenment a worthwhile gesture, or is it just a lark? Are we ever going to find anything? Was Jodorowsky tearing down everything he saw around him in order to find a way through? Is this another movie about the search for the greater something in the post-1969 black hole before disco and cocaine really took over? Is it fraudulent?

Whatever it is, it is a visually stunning, frequently obscene, sometimes blasphemous, biting, prescient piece of work. With constant nudity, violence, and viscera, Jodorowsky frequently keeps his viewers on their toes. That he also has an eye for extraordinary compositions makes The Holy Mountain an art piece to be reckoned with.

Required Viewing.

Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973): I Hate New Yorkers

Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973)
dir: Andy Milligan

In 1973, Andy Milligan would direct his last X-rated sexploitation feature, Fleshpot on 42nd Street. This swan song to the genre is, like any of Milligan's other movies, less about the tawdry and more about the people. And, like any of Milligan's other movies, almost all of these people are assholes, bitches, jerks, dicks, and otherwise people who you should be hating but find yourself to be kind of loving.

Fleshpot on 42nd Street, more than any other Milligan movie, is a sour ode to the New York of old. The New York which was completely populated by trannies, junkies, hookers, pimps, and deviant corrupt businessmen. The New York surrounded by the school of hard knocks, and the people who hustle to get by. This isn't the sanitized, expensive, Manhattan that is currently pushed as the norm full of bright lights and show business. This is the New York where everybody is out for themselves.

At the center is Dusty, a hustler from frame one. We're introduced to her as she's sitting on a chair in a dirty filthy apartment. The guy with whom she's been living is pissed because she doesn't work, pay rent, cook, or clean. The only thing she can do is fuck. And, she counters that she's been paying plenty with her ass.  They fight, fuck, and then he's happy and goes to work. As soon as he's gone, Dusty robs the guy's place and hawks his goods at the pawn shop, where she also fucks and robs the married pawn dealer.

After this savory setup, we meet up with the sour soulless heart of the film, Cherry, a somewhat chubby, older, drag queen with a tongue sharp enough to cut hair. Cherry also hooks to make a living. Upon arriving at Cherry's place, Dusty takes a trick from Cherry. The trick likes it rough, and proceeds to whip her with a belt. After fucking the S&M trick, Dusty and Cherry go to a bar to drink, and have catty shouting matches with a couple of catty broads, the Simmons Sisters. Eventually, Dustyhooks up with a nice guy, who romances the shit out of her. Dusty falls in love. There is no happy ending.

While this movie did originally exist in softcore and hardcore formats (and is currently only available in the softcore with all of the sex scenes cut short), Milligan is far more interested in showing just how hard and shitty people are. As usual. At one point, Dusty is talking about her pimp boyfriend who has been sent up the clink for five years, and laments how he was a really good pimp. Or, when Dusty picks up a trick, Cherry leers on with admiration as she works faster than you could smoke a cigarette.  Later, Cherry shows her prowess by working a guy with the same amount of speed. Cherry follows the guy to his truck, and things go well until he pushes off his wig and almost beats her.

This isn't a happy-go-lucky porno. This isn't Deep Throat where it could ostensibly be about pleasure, or Behind the Green Door where the sex is performed for high class people in exotic situations. The sex in Fleshpot is barely even about anybody's pleasure. The sex in the softcore version makes the sex seem even more like a necessity than something that either party wants. Dusty is doing it for the money. The johns are doing it to get off, and don't care what they stick it in. Fleshpot provides a lusciously unsavory and unerotic portrait of an era now past in New York.

Milligan's neuroses are on full display in Fleshpot too. His hatred for women, and for men who act like women are at the forefront...again. Dusty is a manipulative thieving bitch. Cherry is a catty good-for-nothing drag queen who will stab you in the back for no good reason. The Simmons Sisters...well...all they do is bitch. But, most of the men fare no better. The first john is an easily-duped-by-pussy moron who gets his ass robbed because he dared suggest somebody clean. The other johns are largely violent and almost psychopathic. The only one who seems any good doesn't have things turn out well for him.  This is Milligan shitting on the world in which he lives. In both Butchers and Werewolves, Milligan had escaped to Britain to create period pieces that hid his world, but in Fleshpot it is in full on display.

Even without the hardcore scenes, Fleshpot is a definite watch. The dichotomy between the sex scenes and the drama is jarring at best as it is. Suddenly, the cliche 70s porn flute kicks in, which then changes to dramatic music as the sex goes violent. It's a jagged pill to swallow as it is, and with hardcore sex thrown in, it may even rip your throat out as you try to figure out what Milligan is doing. And, it's fascinating but soul-searing to be inside one man's sour little world for 80 minutes.

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.