i spit on your grave - The Screengrab

The Slasher Movie Comes of Age

In The Atlantic, James Parker sings the praises of "that most misunderstood of genres," the slasher flick. Actually, Parker doesn't really make a case for the genre being misunderstood so much as boldly step up to declare that he watches them voluntarily, and he can quote Ted Hughes (“Its mishmash of scripture and physics, / With here, brains in hands, for example, / And there, legs in a treetop.” ) and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, which, though a fine rendering of a classic work, does not include an appearance by a naked Angelina Jolie in flesh high heels. "The classic slasher flick," he writes, "is produced at high speed, on a squeaker of a budget, and bows briefly for an anointing of critical scorn before going on to make piles of money. With a bit of luck, that critical scorn will be amplified into cultural censure—1980’s rape-revenge slasher, I Spit on Your Grave, for instance, was widely and windily reviled, to the enduring profit of its makers. 'The more the film was attacked,' writer-director Meir Zarchi confided to Variety last year, 'the more money shot into my pocket.'” He must have done pretty damn well. I'm not sure that I've ever actually seen I Spit on Your Grave, but I remember, as if it were yesterday, the 1981 "special" episode of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel's old syndicated movie-reviews TV show Sneal Previews that was set aside for the purpose of heaping scorn and disgust on what were then just beginning to be called slasher (or "splatter") films, with I Spit on Your Grave a prime target. Watching a clip from the movie, in which a bunch of scuzzball louts swaggered around the fallen body of a violated young woman, sandwiched between the TV showmen clucking and posturing about the death of civilization, one felt much as one does at a screening of Freddy vs. Jason: it's not clear who you should root for, but you'd settle for checking off the box marked "None of the Above."

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part One)

We’ve spent a lot of time discussing quality, award-winning cinema during the past few weeks of Award Season mania, but now that Hugh Jackman has doffed his top hat and tails and the Slumdog kids have shuffled back to Bollywood, we thought it would be as good a time as any to get back to all the SEX-CRAZED!!!! BLOOD-THIRSTY!!!! ULTRA-PSYCHOTIC!!!! movies we really like, from the gin-soaked swamps and drive-ins of hixploitation to the blaxploitation grindhouse and...BEYOND!!!!

And sure, if you think about it, pretty much everything Hollywood pumps out is some form of exploitation, from the straight-up blood and guts of the zillionth Friday the 13th remake to the pity party relationship-porn of He’s Just Not That Into You. Even this year’s Oscar nominees were baited with pulp: after all, Mickey Rourke’s face in The Wrestler was at least as freaky as anything in Freaks, and where would The Reader be without all the hot Nazi sex and Kate Winslet’s big pepperoni nipples?

But the movies on this week’s list go even faster, pussycat...not to mention further, deeper, weirder and wilder. They did it first or they did it best or maybe they really shouldn’t have done it at all. Can your heart stand the shocking facts as Screengrab salutes THE ULTIMATE EXPLOITATION FILMS-A-GO-GO?!!!!??!?!!!

Take Five: Sweet Revenge

Responding to criticism that a review of his had unfairly given information about the ending of a thriller, the late film critic Gene Siskel is said to have replied: "Here is the ending of every thriller ever made -- the bad guy dies." So when, in this week's Take Five, we talk about revenge thrillers, we're not talking about movies where some power-tool-wielding misogynist more or less accidentally gets it in the neck after two hours of tormenting co-eds and/or mapless vacationers. We're talking about movies like Xavier Gens' Frontiers, opening in limited and highly disgusting release this Friday; movies where evildoers show up at the doorstep of innocents only to have the tables turned upon them fairly early on; movies where, for at least a third of their running time, the bad guys aren't in control, and the thrills come from wondering how far those who have been wronged will go to get even. While the revenge flick has a pretty shoddy history, and while Frontiers doesn't look like it's going to bring much more than grosser-than-usual levels of violence and some hamhanded political commentary to the mix, not every movie in the tables-get-turned genre is an exploitative dud. The concept may have reached its nadir with flicks like I Spit On Your Grave, but that doesn't mean you can't savor a pretty tasty dish served cold from time to time.

KEY LARGO (1948)

One of Hollywood's first, and finest, attempts at subverting the conventions of the innocent-people-beseiged-by-evil chestnut was this powerful, terrifically acted quasi-noir. When exiled gangster Johnny Rocco holes up in a Florida resort to wait out a storm, after which he looks to make a triumphant comeback, he doesn't count on two things: the presence of embittered but hard-as-iron vet Frank McCloud (played with icily ironic contempt by Humphrey Bogart) and his own terror at a coming hurricane. As the movie progresses, Edward G. Robinson turns from utterly unflappable master manipulator (as in his famously cruel scene with alcoholic gun moll Claire Trevor) to cowering paranoiac, and the desperate sense of terror is ratcheted up to unbearable levels by director John Huston, at the peak of his powers.