Eh, not everybody likes the same things, thank goodness.
I can see where some folks might decide to give it a miss. Personally, thought it was brilliant.
Spoilers:
The giant blood fountain and ElisaSue’s dissolving into a splotch on the pavement was, for me, a release. The film had, up to that point, been riding the cliff edge of being so disturbing it would tip into comedy unintentionally. That last 40 minutes was telling the audience “it’s ok. This is SUPPOSED to be black humor.” It was the final thing that made this a grand allegory, rather than a ‘story’ with ‘people’.
haven’t seen The Substance yet, i’m reading raves near universally. one thing i would point out is that the filmmaker (Coralie Fargeat) has an earlier film called Revenge. it’s essentially a take on I Spit On Your Grave. i’m not usually a fan of revenge plots, but in this case the filmmaking is so accomplished i really didn’t mind the simplicity of the story. why isn’t she making more movies?!
Revenge was indeed a great film. I think it’s an interesting trend that a lot of the old-school exploitation films that have been given a lot of intellectual cover over the years are starting to get a little pushback in interesting ways. Stuff like I Spit on Your Grave and other grungy 70’s-90’s stuff paid lip service to feminism/female empowerment by “letting” the victims extract their vengeance, but really, they were almost exclusively made by men, and even if the female characters ‘won’ in the end, the path for them was still full of one-sided vulnerability on the part of the actors. The male villains didn’t have to get naked on screen, and the films were marketed with the express purpose of attracting male audiences with female nudity (usually in the context of sexual violence). A vaguely triumphant end doesn’t always make up for an inherently unbalanced process that rests on women’s sexuality.
Something like Revenge keeps a large portion of what might pass for actual female empowerment (and a good old fashioned sense of righteous justice) and very consciously eliminates, or at least severely limits, the old exploitive elements. You can see it in newer films like Revenge, you can see it in explicit spoof callouts like Dudebro Party Massacre III (there is no I or II), and you can see it in a lot of the newer current non-revenge horror, which doesn’t shy away from R rated gore or violence, but is far less likely to contain the obligatory shower or sex scene inserted for the sole reason of getting boobs on screen.
I have been kind of amused to see the marked decrease in nudity in general for ‘movies for adults’ (as opposed to ‘adult movies’), which came about at a time when pornography, once difficult to obtain and view, is now freely available, anywhere, to almost anyone, 24/7. Hormonal teenagers can now satisfy their urges easily, quietly, and PRIVATELY, and are no longer dependent on the 3 second flash of a nipple.
That is on my list to watch, but I’ll wait till it’s streaming for free. @anaxgorous — thanks for that tip, I might want to check that one out as well. It must be free/streaming if it’s from 2017.
There are two movies I’ve refused to watch*, and that’s one of them. It functions entirely as an excuse for the (male, obviously) viewer to watch a woman get violated, with the “out” that she gets revenge on her rapists, thus redeeming said viewers - oh, they were just watching for the turn-the-tables payoff! It’s obscene.
I just read Stephen King’s novella: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. Beautifully written but I almost put it down in the beginning because the description of prison rape was too graphic, too horrifying for me.
It occurred to me that there aren’t many Black people living in Maine and this story begins in late ‘40’s. Sure enough, the narrator, a prisoner named Red, was an Irish man with red hair.
I just can’t picture anyone but Morgan Freeman in this role. I don’t know how he ended up with the part; Tim Robbins was excellent, too.
Funnily enough, Faces of Death is (mostly) all fake. Some of the slaughterhouse stuff is real, of course, but infamous scenes like the ‘monkey brains’ are completely fabricated. I remember eagerly renting this stuff at the video store in the early 80’s, along with Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer and Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To, as all of us were eagerly snapping up the most taboo-looking films we could find, taking advantage of lax parenting and video store clerks that genuinely did not care AT ALL how old you were. There were a few tapes from that little room behind the bead curtain that were obtained as well. Quite an education at 15.
Debbie Does Dallas?Behind the Green Door? Deep Throat? (which I actually watched and found incredibly boring, and that was before I knew the story behind that film).
Martyrs (the 2008 French original-- NOT the 2015 English remake) is one of the most harrowing films I’ve seen. It’s powerful, really well executed, and VERY hard to watch. Especially the last 20 min. I’ve seen it twice. It’s not one I would eagerly watch again, though if someone I knew expressed a desire to watch it, I’d watch it with them, just because it’s not something you should watch alone.
Everything I’ve ever heard about A Serbian Film has indicated that it’s merely shocking and offensive for its own sake, and has little to offer otherwise. I’ve never happened to stumble across it, or I probably WOULD have seen it already, but at this point, I’m not seeking it out and don’t feel bad about missing it.
Yes, yes, and yes. There were many others. Somewhat shamefully, I still remember the titles, which I will not be repeating here. A number of them are ‘classics’ of the genre (such as they are) and a few of them are now HIGHLY illegal, when it was discovered that star Traci Lords was actually underage at the time of filming. People were actually charged in the scandal, but no one was convicted when it was discovered that Lords had used a fake birth certificate and a real federal passport as her proof of age. All of her porn movies, save the very last (filmed two days after her 18th birthday) have been pulled from circulation and banned as child-porn.
Lots of horror movies are told from a killer’s point of view, from “Peeping Tom” to “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.” But none of them ever made me wonder: What would a maniac do on his way to a slaughter? Now I know, thanks to Chris Nash’s glorious and genre-crushing take on the slasher film.
The story is as old as “Friday the 13th”: A masked hulk methodically stalks young campers through the woods and butchers them one by one in unthinkably gruesome ways. Here’s the twist: Nash tracks the silent monster’s steady strolls closely and almost entirely from behind, making the viewer complicit in the hunt and perversely giving evil no motive beyond a vague bloodthirst. The deaths are cartoonish, but because they take place in a verdant, tranquil landscape — a violent nature indeed — their absurd brutality bumps against serenity with shockingly formal elegance, hardly the stuff of typical slasher films.
The film’s unwillingness to play by horror rules makes it singular, and a must-see for adventurous horror fans. It is daring and assured, stomach-churning yet pastoral, and one of my favorite horror films of the year.
It’s a fun series that’s been going since the onset of COVID in 2020, and has been dispensing demonstrations of ancient recipes and ingredients and accompanying historical perspective for almost 4 years now.
He’s done things like make garum (the ancient Roman fish sauce), hard tack, and pemmican that he dutifully stored for a year and then used in recipes as they would have under various circumstances.
He’s pretty scrupulous about citing his sources and is quite frank when mistakes are made (by himself or previous researchers).
