TITLE & REVIEW
Five stereotypical college kids (slut, jock, nerd, stoner and good girl)
go on a road trip to a remote cabin - in the woods.
Naturally, to everyone who has seen
Evil Dead
(or any one of a hundred different horror movies)
this is the beginning of a stalk-and-slash story.
Yes, expect zombies, werewolves, Cenobites, a merman ...
If some of the kids look familiar, that is because the slut is Anna Hutchison , the jock is Chris Hemsworth ( Expendables 2 ) and the stoner is Fran Kranz ( Dollhouse ).
The trailers give away the fact that this is not as straightforward as it seems. From the get-go, the film lets us know things are being manipulated by an office full of workers. Bradley Whitford ( The Handmaid's Tale ) is there, backed up by Joss Whedon's familiar faces like Amy Acker and Tom Lenk ( Buffy: Season 6 ).
The climax, however, includes a final twist that shows this to be more than just a standard meta-thriller. Even knowing there are two stories that eventually overlap, there are still surprises to be had. All in all, an amazing piece of work. Knowing that the creators are responsible for Cloverfield and Buffy: Season 4 may allow you to see additional references ...
After a murder is reported nearby, a bunch of College students (
Lindy Booth
, Jared Padalecki -
Supernatural
) mess with each others' heads in a series of pranks.
Is it Gossip or
Urban Legend
? Is there a REAL serial killer after them?
There are lots of twists - perhaps too many. It tries too hard - but without a big budget (no stars = no publicity) it only had a very complex script to reel in the viewers.
Christina Ricci
and her brother Jesse Eisenberg (
Kick-Ass, Scott Pilgrim
) are stalked by a werewolf in modern-day Los Angeles.
But out of an all-star cast, who is the lycanthrope?
Christina has love interest Joshua Jackson ( Fringe ), rival Judy Greer and boss Michael Rosenbaum ( Smallville ) to worry about.
Jesse wants to date Kristina Anapau , but has to deal with School bully Milo Ventriglia ( Heroes ).
This was directed by Wes Craven , and needed lots of re-shoots. Unfortunately the result of the re-editing is a disjointed effort.
As the title may suggest, this is a low-budget suspense thriller.
A teenage school-girl (
Jennifer Lawrence
- action girl Katniss in
Hunger Games
) and her single mother move into a remote house.
The house next door was scene to a couple of brutal murders, and the killer was never found.
Katniss' mother (
Elizabeth Shue
) is a lady doctor who mostly works night shifts,
when she is not hanging out with local sheriff Gill Bellows (
Shawshank Redemption
). This leaves Katniss free to meet the usual teenage cliched characters at school.
Katniss also befriends the boy next door - sole survivor of the murdered family. Of course, in this kind of film there is a nasty secret. It is all a bit predictable, but no worse than similar shockers Silent House or The Pact . In fact, this is more mainstream version - for some reason it was given a 15 certificate in the UK, but it is a pretty tame, PG-13 film.
Miguel Ferrer (
Robocop
) is a reporter obsessed with a serial killer.
This particular killer uses a push-prop monoplane to fly from victim to victim.
This was based on a Stephen King short story. It is a suspenseful effort, despite being a made-for-TV movie.
Some super-beautiful girls hang out in a US College Sorority.
Audrina Patridge
is a babe,
Rumer Willis
is the token nerdy girl, and
Carrie Fisher
is the House Mother.
The Queen Bitch and her pals play a practical joke on someone.
Naturally it all goes badly wrong.
A year later, someone starts bumping off the witnesses. Like in I Know What You Did Last Summer , but with more babes and fewer guys ... think Black Christmas (2005) done without the sense of irony.
Despite its cliched nature, it actually gets better in the third act. This is because Carrie Fisher has some great scenes in it - perhaps she rewrote her own dialogue (as she did in Time Guardian
This is a rough-around-the-edges slasher parody from County Wicklow, Ireland.
It is all very tongue-in-cheek,
although one imagines that the American market will not understand the combination of horror and comedy.
It works well either way.
The SPFX are incredibly gory.
Stitches is a second-rate clown played by English stand-up comedian Ross Noble. He performs at an 8-year-old's birthday party, but the group of kids play cruel tricks on him and he dies in a horrific accident as a result.
The film jumps forward six years, until the characters are all supposedly 14 years old. The fact that they are played by unknowns helps it work, but the actors are all bound to be ten years older than their characters.
The birthday boy, now a Harry Potter lookalike, is terrified of clowns and birthdays. But eventually his friends talk him into holding a party so he can invite the girl of his dreams. Naturally, the party grows, and then gets gate-crashed by a killer clown back from the dead!
Louisiana, USA - a redneck is contaminated by evil souls that had been imprisoned by voodoo.
Now a murderous zombie, he goes on a kill-crazy rampage after
Agnes Bruckner
and her hot teenage friends.
A young woman (
Amber Heard
), the archetypal Final Girl of the horror genre,
is sent to a looney bin in early 1960s USA - the era of ECT and dubious experiments.
She is put on a ward filled with similarly attractive young women,
where they are stalked by a potentially supernatural mass-murderer.
This is John Carpenter 's comeback, eight years after Ghosts of Mars - but it is boring and predictable. The cast of B-List starlets (up-and-comers, like the sidekick from the 2010 Nikita TV show) are nice to look at ... But the Killer is just bland. Carpenter is the king of the slasher film, he gave us Halloween , arguably the first and best example of the genre. Then he moved away from the teenagers in danger trope and gave us grown men in danger in The Thing . He seems to have forgotten everything he taught us. This just adds to the disappointment.
The story starts with a bunch of Young Offenders in a tough 1970s-style Borstal
(like in the infamous prison drama Scum.
Tough guard Sean Pertwee (
Event Horizon
) takes the lads on a field trip to a remote island.
They bump into an identical party comprising of their female counterparts, including
Lenora Critchlow
.
Someone with a crossbow and pack of hunting dogs starts to bump them off. There is no chainsaw or hockey mask - this killer wears a ghillie suit, which makes him the most convincing threat in the genre!
What separates this from a revenge thriller is the apparent lack of justice. The victim's pain is inversely proportional to the amount they deserve it.
Mental patient
Patsy Kensit
escapes. She then stalks a shrink (Patrick Muldoon)
who thinks she is the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper.
This was filmed in the Republic of Ireland.
Ann (
Barbara Steele
) is a rich old English lady
who lives in an apartment block in the USA.
She has a murderous grudge against a young Black man,
the assistant of the building's handyman Nick (Ray Wise -
Robocop
). Is she a racist Karen?
No, it turns out her grudge is because he witnessed something
that might get her in trouble.
Ann's hobby is pinning butterflies. She also befriends and tutors a young schoolgirl. However, this friendship with the girl seems to be mutually abusive and exploitative. It leads to a dangerous obsession.
Ann befriends her neighbour, Claudia ( Erica Leerhsen ), and looks after Claudia's daughter when Claudia is away. However, Ann's estranged daughter Dorothy ( Heather Langenkamp ) threatens to reveal the truth about her mother.
Since this is a female-based horror movie, with few male characters, this passes the Bechdel test. There are lots of cameos by late 1970s scream queens - Olga ( Camille Keaton ), Rachel ( Adrienne King ) and Lauren ( P.J. Soles ) all stand out. Director Joe Dante even has a cameo as the Taxi Driver.
This is a story about a middle-class white woman named Alice (
Alexis Kendra
) who lives in contemporary Los Angeles.
She befriends her cleaning lady, a working-class woman named Shelly.
The divide between them is not racial, as they are both caucasian.
Rather it is based on beauty norms.
Alice is a blonde with perfect skin who works as a dermatologist.
Shelly is facially disfigured by burns.
It turns out that while Shelly has an incredibly shy and placid demeanor, she also has a secret that seems reminiscent of the J-Horror movie Audition . She also has a very particular set of skills, which allow her to create a home-made latex mask of someone's face that is almost as good as the professionally made ones in Mission Impossible .
We get flashbacks of Shelly's abusive childhood, which explain that there is correlation between her damaged face and psyche but that does not mean there is causation. She is mentally ill because she was abused, which also led to her disfiguration. Now she has a fixation on the immorality of adultery, among other things.
The male characters, few and far between, are creepy idiots. However, there are several important female roles in this film. That certainly puts it above the normal stalk-and-slash effort. Perhaps the reason is that although the Director was male, his co-writer and co-producer was also the female lead of the movie.
Chloe Grace Moretz
discovers a lost bag on the subway.
She returns it to the original owner, Greta (
Isabelle Hubbert
), and strikes up an unlikely friendship.
Of course, nothing is quite what it seems.
There is a tense scene when the heroine's flatmate ( Maika Monroe ) is stalked by someone posting pictures real-time via cell-phone.
The protagonist's father (Colm Feore - Chronicles of Riddick ) hires a private detective (Stephen Rea - Interview With A Vampire ).
May (
Angela Bettis
) is a strange lonely shy girl.
She develops a strange obsession with tweenager Jeremy Sisto (Suburgatory).
She also finds distraction with her co-worker, Lipstick Lesbian
Anna Faris
.
An American couple adopt a young girl.
Unfortunately she is creepy,
and mysterious accidents happen to everyone around her.
This is the directorial debut of
Clint Eastwood
, and features his mentor
Don Siegal
in a major supporting role.
The protagonist (Clint Eastwood - ) is a radio DJ who has a one-night stand with a fan who picks him up in his favourite bar. Unfortunately she gets a bit clingy, and will not respect his boundaries. This builds up to her becoming the prototype bunny-boiler for Fatal Attraction .
There is a saying that Most of Directing is Casting, and that certainly seems to be the case in this film. The female antagonist really steals the movie, and it is a shame the actress never got to move on to bigger films.
A police detective gets involved in the case. Yes, a certain modern trope - best known from The Shining - is shown here in what may be its first outing.
This is practically a scene-for-scene remake of Single White Female.
Unfortunately, it does not have the toplessness.
Minka Kelly
is a 29-year-old pretending to be ten years younger.
Leighton Meester
is her new college room-mate,
and Billy Zane (Titanic) is the lecherous college professor.
A group of tweenagers drink-drive home from a party,
and like in
I Know What You Did Last Summer
they get involved in a road traffic accident.
They drive off and pretend it did not happen,
but the other car's sole survivor (
Anna Hutchinson
) becomes obsessed with payback.
The next year, a single mother ( Nicky Whelan ) takes her tweenage kids to the town. They stay in an Air B'N'B rental hose, and their landlady is ... the sole survivor lady. She recognises their car as the one that killed her family, so she starts stalking them - like in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle .
Eventually, someone starts bumping off the tweens who caused the crash. The killer is kept out of shot - there is no stylish killer identity, with a memorable mask or disguise. After all, this is not a serial killer/slasher movie but a TV domestic drama aimed at a female audience.
This is based on a novel, and follows the Room-mate from hell theme.
Brigid Fonda
breaks up with her BF, and takes
Jennifer Jason Leigh
as her new lodger.
Unfortunately, the new lodger is not taking her medication.
There is a lot of violence, and some memorable toplessness.
Mia Wasiawski
and her recently-widowed mother (
Nicole Kidman
) are joined by creepy uncle Matthew Goode (
Watchmen
).
This was directed by the same man who directed the shocking Korean film, Oldboy . He has added some incredible visual touches. It is basically a vampire film without the trappings of vampirism. The blood-lust is human, not supernatural, and the result is a stylish display of psychopathic violence.
This is a story about a couple of college girls on winter break.
The brunette's family is away in Europe,
so the blonde one invites her to stay in her upper-middle-class home.
However, the brunette sets her eyes on her friend's stepfather
and starts to ingratiate herself into the family.
Her efforts as a care-giver and home-maker might seem benign,
were it not for her tendency to roofie everyone who might pose a threat to her.
Also, the police are investigating a series of mysterious deaths on the campus.
This has a few similarities with Single White Female , but it is a made-for-television movie-of-the-week effort. It smacks of the old based on a true story films that proliferated on daytime television a few years ago, although it seems too generic to be about a specific true-crime event.
Like most made-for-TV entertainment, this is aimed at a female audience. As a result the main characters are female, with the stepfather and the cops almost thrown in as afterthoughts. While relatively few Hollywood movies pass the Bechdel test, this is not the same for TV movies.
This is an American film from the early 1970s.
A widow hires a series of elderly women as her housekeeper,
cons them out of their life's savings, and murders them.
This fails as a whodunnit or a slasher film. We know who the killer is, and that killer is not a serious threat the way others
A pair of lesbians spend their honeymoon at a
Cabin in the Woods
. We spend the First Act of the story with Jackie (
Hannah Emily Anderson
) and Jules (
Brittany Allen
), and get to know them a bit.
Then comes the shock of the inciting incident,
which leaves them fighting for survival.
The protagonist survives a potentially fatal attack. Her resulting injuries come and go as the plot requires. First she is as good as dead, then she makes a getaway. Then she has a broken ankle and a dislocation ... but she still fights back really well - until the point when she gets paralysed with fear. At least the pace of the story is so fast that the audience is constantly distracted by new developments.
The killer is much better organised. She even has what looks like a modern remake of a FG42 rifle, a lightweight semi-auto rifle equipped for hunting. Unfortunately this amazing rifle only appears in a few scenes, and mysteriously disappears before it gets used properly.
This is a prequel to
X (2019)
, which means there are a few references to that film.
But even if one has not seen it,
and thus does not know exactly what is being foreshadowed,
it is still easy to get into.
The title character, Pearl ( Mia Goth ) is a lonely young woman living on a farm in North America. Her husband has gone off to fight in the First World War, so she has moved in with her aging parents. Although her father is immobile due to disability, her domineering mother is active enough for both of them.
Trapped in her lonely home-life, Pearl dreams of getting out of the dreary small town. She flirts with the projectionist in the local movie theatre, and auditions for the local theatre group. Of course, she has issues with rejection. This boils over into shocking violence.
Mia Goth may be surrounded by a good cast, but she is in every single scene and she carries the entire movie. Her performance is uninhibited, especially considering the director's love of minutes-long shots. Not just in amazing monologues and stalk-and-slash scenes, but even in the end credits sequence itself. Goth is phenomenal, and to say this film is worth watching for her performance alone is misleading because it imples there is something in the film outside of her performance.
In the early 1980s, Maxine (
Mia Goth
) and her tweenage friends go to a remote farmhouse
where her boyfriend has rented the barn as location
to film a porno movie.
The place is a bit reminiscent of
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
, although nobody seems to notice.
There is also at least one visual homage to
Psycho
, a movie which is actually name-checked as one character's favourite
so it is hard to find an excuse for the blatant genre-blindness.
Halfway through, someone starts killing the crew off. The audience are too enthralled in the story, which features the camera assistant ( Jenna Ortega ) volunteering to shoot a porno scene, and do not care what happens to the other characters.
The protagonist is a homeless man,
an immigrant from Eastern Europe.
A nun (Imelda Staunton) finds him a place to stay -
with a young woman who is caring for her elderly mother.
The man tries to help out as a handyman,
and discovers the house has a strange bat infestation.
The protagonist has flashbacks to his time conscripted into guard duty during his homeland's war. This gives him something of a dark backstory, and the movie turns full circle in the end.
This was written and directed by Romola Garai , best known as an actress a few decades ago. She delivers one of the new wave of horror movies, something that has an anti-male edge but with the supernatural element of the mainstream genre.
Tess (
Georgina Campbell
) arrives at a house in suburban USA,
where she has booked a short-term stay on a website.
Keith (Bill Skarsgård -
IT
) is already there,
and claims to also be a short-term stay tenant.
Were they accidentally double-booked,
or is there something more sinister?
The house turns out to be in an abandoned Detroit neighbourhood, just like the one in Don't Breathe (2016) . This sets the mood, almost as much as the fact that the co-star is a rent-a-villain best known as a creepy killer clown. Worse, there is a mysterious tunnel in the basement.
The house's absentee landlord is AJ (Justin Long - Jeepers Creepers ), an actor in Hollywood. He is victim of a #MeToo allegation, so he visits the house in the hope of selling it. As the story's most interesting character, he swings between a redeemable victim and a selfish narcisist.
This starts with a shower scene that knocks
Psycho
off the top spot.
It is shown out of context,
but it gets explained later. Sort of.
The protagonist, Evan Cole (Seann William Scott - Evolution ), is a High School guidance counsellor by day. However, the stress of looking after his pregnant wife Lauren Cole ( Mariela Garriga ) has driven him to pick up a hobby. He becomes a serial killer, targeting the deadbeat dads of his school's pupils.
When the wife gives birth, the protagonist's mother ( Dale Dickey ) comes to stay.
The police start to investigate. A detective (Kevin Carroll - The Leftovers ) visits to ask questions. This makes the wife suspicious of what her husband is really up to.
This is set in the 1980s,
when the British government cracked down on low-budget horror movies
known in the tabloid media as Video Nasties.
The protagonist works for the censorship department.
When a horror movie actress reminds her of her long-lost sister,
she tries to track down the filmmakers.
The trail leads to the Producer (Michael Smiley -
A Field In England
).
The result is a film that works on a number of levels. Like many American horror films in the post-MeToo era, it has an anti-male bias and features mainly or entirely male fatalities. However, this is a British film so it is also self-knowing, and points out the silliness of the feminist agenda.
Just like in the original movie,
this is about a teenage girl who goes to a new High School
and makes friends with a trio of witches.
Together, they become supernaturally powerful.
However, this version of the story has a few differences.
It seems to be set circa 2010, because the girls talk about the
Twilight
movies and one of them is a fan of
Kristen Stewart,
while they enjoy listening to songs by
Alannis Morrisette
.
The main girl has moved because her mother ( Michelle Monaghan ) has found a new lover (David Duchovny - X-Files ). naturally, this stepfather figure is a bit creepy. He names his three sons after OId Testament characters, so he might be a witchhunter. It turns out that he writes books about masculinity, so he is clearly toxic. Finally, he says that he likes snakes because the Pagan people thought they were powerful. So he might be a Warlock instead of a witchhunter. Almost as if the writers did not have a clear idea of what they wanted to do with the character, so they just threw in a bunch of generic ideas.
One of the teenage boys at school is a bully, so the witches magically roofie and chemically castrate him. The result is a super-woke, brainwashed loser that they treat as their gay best friend. Eventually something bad happens, and the witches have to take responsibility for their actions. One of them even admits that what they did to him was not exactly consentual.
Unfortunately, this movie has a Third Act climax tacked on. Instead of having to take responsibility, they simply use their girl-power to defeat a strawman avatar for Da Patriarchy. Yes, like all two-dimensional female protagonists these days they overcome adversity without a struggle and without learning anything.
The final scene links this movie in with the original, although it creates more questions than it answers.
This is a slasher movie set on a college campus.
The nearest comparison is with
Black Christmas (2019)
, but this is a much better film in every single way.
Perhaps that is not saying much,
since the other movie is so poor in every way
and this one seems to have a much bigger budget,
but this is actually a decent film.
The story starts at a Fraternity party in a US College. While the Sorority girls' have a pre-party safety briefing, the all-white Frat Bros have a cliched sexist misogynist speech. This leads up to a suspicious incident involving a sorority girl and the younger brother of the Final Girl. What makes it worse is that the brother was victim of similar allegations the previous year.
As befits the contemporary era it is set in, the characters communicate a lot by texts on their smart-phones. This is portrayed on-screen in a flashier version of the system used in Cherrybomb. However, the usual tropes of No Signal and Battery Low are used to signify an increase in suspense.
A masked killer starts murdering the Fraternity boys. The lead detective ( Yancy Butler ) suspects it is an inside job. The Dean of the University, Dr Butler (Lochlyn Munro - Freddy Vs Jason ), is more worried about alarming the rich college Alumni because his budget depends on their donations.
This film skewers the free love atmosphere associated with US college life, which the Feminist movement refers to as Rape Culture. However, it also avoids the complaint of violence-against-womyn by ensuring the killer prefers to target males rather than females. That said, the death scenes are shocking and suspenseful - unlike those in Charlie's Angels (2019) , where the male characters were all treated as expendable bags of meat.
A young woman named Eloise (
Thomasin McKenzie
) gets accepted to study at Art College.
The good news is that she can leave home,
since she is mildly psychic
and the place is haunted by the ghost of her dead mother.
The bad news is that the college is in the busy Soho district of London,
and she is a quiet girl from the countryside.
Unhappy with the fast-paced student life in the Uni's Halls of Residence,
she rents a private room in the nearby home of Miss Collins (
Diana Rigg
).
Eloise's psychic powers go into overdrive. She dreams about a girl named Sandy ( Anya Taylor-Joy ), who lived in the swinging 1960s and wanted to become a star. She was seduced by Jack (Matt Smith - Dr Who ), who promised to make her dreams come true.
Eloise is stalked by a dozen creepy faceless ghosts. Worse, the mysterious silver-haired gentleman (Terence Stamp - Star Wars: The Phantom Menace ) lurks around. He even claims to have known Sandy. But what happened to her?
This is not the first movie to have addressed the supposed dark side of the 1960s - Sudden Impact (1983) did it, and even Austin Powers (1997) pointed out that the Free Love ethos was no longer compatible with the feminist era.
This starts with the story of a young hooker who works out of a motel.
She gets knocked up with twins by a satanic customer,
and kills herself trying to self-abort.
Twenty-three years later, one of the kids somehow survived and has now become a bicycle messenger. She gets hit by a car, and then develops mental problems. Missing time, strange things happening that she cannot remember ...
The doctor's diagnosis is that the girl has a parasitic twin, in the form of a clump of cells in her brain. This becomes a bit more than a psychiatric situation, as the twin slowly takes over her body and mind.
The story has a bit of a man-bashing in it, as most of the victims are men who want to spend time with the girl. However, the climax has a fight with a Final Girl ... and we get to see the SPFX that most of the movie's budget must have been spent on.
Jessie Buckley
rents a short-term let for a couple of weeks.
Just like
Georgina Campbell
did in
Barbarian (2022)
, but with a different set of problems.
The rented house is a big mansion in a small village. All the locals look alike, played by the actor Rory Kinnear ( Our Flag Means Death ). This is a good cost-saving measure, and no doubt helped with the Covid safety measures. However, it can also be taken as a misandrist move to illustrate how all men are basically interchangeable.
The protagonist is being stalked by a creepy naked man. She also has flashbacks to the death of her husband (Paapa Essiedu - Lazarus Project ), and visions of the pagan god known as the Green Man. The result is a surreal confusion as to whether the woman is mentally ill or she is being acted upon by supernatural forces. Of course, both could simultaneously be true.
Typical of the lower end of the Horror market, this was written and directed by one person. Strangely for the anti-male subgenre, this was a man - the highly experienced Alex Garland .
This is a story about serial killers.
There are no characters you can really empathise with, just different degrees of killer.
The central character is a promiscuous young woman who has graphic sex with a lot of men.
Instead of relying on a model-turned-actress
who was chosen purely on her willingness to do the nudity,
the film-makers got lucky and found a strong female lead.
The actress is very accomplished, with a CV packed with television roles,
but she has enough professionalism to perform the requisite nude scenes.
The young woman meets a man (Noah Taylor - Powers ) who claims to have been a US Army interrogator in Iraq. The man appears to have many of the stereotypical attributes of a serial killer. However, at the mid-point of the story it takes an incredible twist, when we discover that one of the characters is a mass-murderer.
The final act of the story is a murderous revenge spree. By this stage there is not really anyone left to root for.
This starts, like all good monster movies, by introducing the monster itself.
The antagonist (Russell Crowe -
Gladiator
) is a neck-beard who epitomises all the cliches of so-called toxic masculinity.
We also know from the get-go that he is a murderer and a wife-beater,
so there is no depth of character expected at all.
The female protagonist is established as an over-stretched single mother. She transgresses in a minor way, by excessively beeping her horn, and this road-rage incident spirals into something far worse.
Normally a slasher movie has a series of female victims. This effort tries to be different by moving away from traditional fem-jep. The killer targets the female lead by attacking the males in her life - her lawyer (Jimmi Simpson - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter ), her brother and her pre-teen son.
Mary Mason (
Katharine Isabelle
) is a medical student who is desperate for money.
She goes to a go-go club to audition as a masseuse,
and ends up getting sucked into the world of illegal surgery and body modification.
The film's dramatic storyline has a rape-and-revenge subplot. Mary is sexually assaulted, and takes a horrific revenge on her attacker. While the distributors focus on this subplot so they can safely categorise the film as horror, it is a character drama rather than a slasher film or a torture porn flick.
This was written and directed by the Soska Sisters , and is a prime example of their reinvention of the horror genre.
A couple of plainclothes cops take on a gang of scary crooks.
One of these heroic law officers is wounded in the line of duty,
so he and his girlfriend (
Ellen Holloman
) go for a romantic trip into the backwoods of the USA.
After all, they assume the crime and danger is in the Big City ...
The happy couple run into some murderous rednecks who are involved in moonshining and whatever else. Despite the setup of the male cop as the hero figure, it turns out that the real protagonist is his love interest. She spends the rest of the movie hunting down and killing the redneck gang.
Unlike some other films of this genre, this one actually has a great star in the lead role. Holloman was Saxa the Warrior Woman in Spartacus: War of the Damned , and now we get to see what she can do on her own. There are some great fight scenes, and hopefully we will get to see more of her in the future.
A Final Girl is held prisoner in a dungeon.
However, the torture porn does not procede in the cliched way the old movies did.
Instead it embraces the new trope - that the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
The girl overpowers her captor,
and tortures him into taking her to save his other victims.
However, things do not go exactly as she plans.
The man repeatedly suggests that she take him to a hospital. After her own ordeal, a trip to a doctor would probably be a good idea. Also, the police would be far better suited to getting the truth out of him and rescuing the other girls than she would. However, we must suspend our disbelief and embrace the unlikely premise of this story.
The story is intercut with flashbacks, found footage of the girl on a day out at the beach with her boyfriend and sister. This adds a sense of unreality to the movie, because it leaves us unsure of how much the Untruthful Narrator trope will be invoked.
The protagonist, Cassie Holt (
Alice Eve
), is an English homicide investigator.
She is called to Ireland on a case for her mentor (Antonio Banderas -
Haywire
). We get a series of flashbacks through the movie,
of him training her like Wes Bentley in
Final Girl
.
Cassie takes the lead in the Garda's hunt for a serial killer. Jamie Douglas ( Shelley Hennig ) has taken Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to the next level, which makes her more like Dexter. Her victims are local rich people who she claims sex-trafficked her, which basically puts them in the same category as the villains in Taken . Of course, Cassie has a traumatic backstory of her own - in the #MeToo era, this is standard - so she empathises with the killer.
The victims are a pretty bland lot. After all, they only exist as strawmen to be killed off. To further soften the impact of the killer's crimes, most of the extreme violence only takes place off-screen. Until the final act, that is, when Jamie Dornan's mother from The Tourist (Season 2) is allowed some screen time.
The protagonist (
Odeya Rush
) is a young woman whose mother (
Saffron Burrows
) takes her on a yachting trip with her new boyfriend (Eric Dane -
).
A group of pirates, led by Ray Liotta ( Cocaine Bear ), are in search of new victims for human trafficking. They are a bunch of hardened killers. However, the protagonist went paintballing once so she is more than a match for the lot of them.
This was written and directed by
Pollyanna Macintosh
, who also stars as a murderous feral woman.
Luckily she did not give herself any dialogue to memorise,
and just snarls or grunts at the rest of the cast.
Somehow there was a family of feral women, which defies the solitary beginnings of real-life feral people. One of them, a young-looking tweenage girl, ends up in a hospital and is handed over to the Catholic church. In reality her situation would be like in The Magdalene Sisters, but instead she is put in a nice boarding school where she successfully learns to integrate with other girls.
Pollyanna decides to track down her sister, even if she has to murder every single person she meets. Luckily the hospital orderly is Jerry, Pollyanna's co-star from The Walking Dead , so he is friendly and helpful. Strangely nobody seems to tell him about her murder spree at his workplace. In fact, the police do not turn up to investigate at all.
In a major twist, it turns out that the Catholic Bishop may not be as nice as he pretends. Not exactly original.
The protagonist (
Lia Williams
) is an average English woman who becomes a man-hater.
The protagonist, Eileen (
Thomasin Mackenzie
), is a secretarial worker at a youth prison in 1960s USA.
Her workplace is boring and depressing,
while at home she has to look after her alcoholic father (Shea Wigham -
Agent Carter
). As a result, she fantasises about sex with cow-orkers
and murdering her father.
The prison gets a new psychologist - Dr Rebecca ( Anne Hathaway ). Eileen is drawn to Rebecca, and becomes obsessed with her. However, Rebecca is obsessed with her work.
The story boils over into eventual violence. At least it passes the Bechdel test.
A middle-aged businesswoman (
Isabelle Huppert
) is victim to a violent rape.
She does not inform the police -
it turns out that she does not trust them,
as her father is a convicted spree-killer currently up for parole.
Instead she fantasises about taking revenge on her attacker,
and arms herself appropriately.
This is shot entirely in the French language, with subtitles in English. The cast and crew were all French, with a couple of exceptions. So why is it not listed among the Giallo genre efforts? The director, Paul Verhoeven , is Dutch - but in the 1980s and 1990s he made a string of big-budget Hollywood hits, so he is an International film-maker rather than a European one. This movie was originally intended as an English-language effort, but Verhoeven was unable to find a middle-aged American actress who had the big-name recognition necessary for the project.
Lucy (
Ilana Glazer
) and Adrian (Justin Theroux -
Your Highness
) are trying to have a baby together.
They sign up with fertility expert Dr Hindle (Pierce Brosnan -
Goldeneye
) and his nurse (
Gretchen Mol
). However, Lucy begins to think something creepy is going on.
Adrian is a doctor himself, and Dr Hindle was his mentor at medical school. As a result, they often collaborate behind Lucy's back. When the treatment works and she becomes pregnant, it feels reminiscent of Rosemary's Baby . She is troubled by strange dreams, and begins to prefer having a traditional midwife over a patriarchal doctor. Yes, this has a strangely misandrist undertone to it that becomes more and more explicit as the story continues.
Lucy's boss Greg (Josh Hamilton - Walking Dead (S11) ) is supportive. Likewise, her gal-pal Corgan ( Sophia Bush ) tries to help. However, they both seem tainted with the sin of patriarchy.
As the title would suggest, this is a slasher movie
with a twist on the trope about the female protagonist.
Instead of there being a single killer wiping out a bunch of girls until only one is left,
there is a gang of killers who get wiped out by their intended victim.
Psychologist Wes Bentley ( Hunger Games ) takes an orphaned young girl under his wing. He trains her like Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass , and she grows up to be Abigail Breslin . Then he sets her loose as live bait to entrap Alexander Ludwig ( Vikings ) and his gang of Frat-boy types who play The Most Dangerous Game with young blonde women in the woods.
Breslin has been menaced by serial killers before, in Scream Queens . And in all fairness, even though that show was played entirely for laughs it is a lot more realistic than this effort. The lead actress is petite, slender and entirely unconvincing in her fight scenes.
This is stacked with the others because of the similar title,
the fact that it features Alexander Ludwig (
Vikings
) and came out the same year.
However, it is not actually part of the rape-and-revenge genre.
In fact, it bounces between three other genres.
The first story this movie tells is about a tweenage girl ( Taissa Farmiga ) and her single mother ( Malin Akerman ) who used to be a Scream Queen actress in teen slasher movies. The girl gets orphaned, and spends the rest of the story trying to get over her loss.
The orphan and her friend ( Nina Dobrev ) get roped into attending a public showing of the slasher movie that made her mother infamous. Things go wrong, and the tweenagers find themselves magically transported to inside the movie. This is basically a parody of the Friday the 13th series.
When the slaughter really begins, this film reveals its third genre. The scares and gore are on a par with the original films that this seeks to parody. In fact, the originals are tongue-in-cheek and have nothing to compare with the slo-mo running-while-on-fire scene.
This is a good film that works on several levels. It is even set up for a sequel, which has yet to appear. However, the mix of genres makes it an uneven ride.
College student
Danielle Panabaker
attends Womens Studies classes during the week,
instead of taking a STEM class.
She dates a married man at the weekend,
so she is a home-wrecker into the bargain.
In no way should she be taken as a feminist icon.
Our heroine gets stood up, but luckily she meets another girl who offers to cheer her up. The girl takes her to a bar, and they end up hanging out with some very rapey dudes. One thing leads to another, and we end up in a rape-and-revenge thriller.
The storyline is predictable, but the high point is actually some Tarantino-esque dialogue between the girls.
This is about a female serial killer, a distaff version of Dexter.
She is a psychiatrist by day, and by night she stalks and murders convicted paedophiles.
This is not about justice - most of them have been through the court system,
which in the real world is run by women.
Even the cop obsessed with solving the case of the missing paedophiles is a woman.
The killer's obsession is more about the pleasure she gets from the kill.
Her real driver is the guilt she feels for failing to protect her younger sister from abuse -
reminiscent of the killer's motive in
Sudden Impact (1983)
, perhaps.
The standout performance is by Raylee Hill , who only has one scene but is incredible. Hill plays the mother of one of the protagonist's former patients - from the days when she specialised in treating abused children.
When the shrink is visited by her former patient, she begins to question if she has gone too far. This is a perfect opportunity for the character to have a story arc, and actually undergo some development. Of course, this is a micro-budget ozsploitation movie written and directed by one man so there is always the chance it will choose spectacle over plotting ...
A couple of young women accompany their boyfriends for a weekend break at a
Cabin in the Woods
. Unfortunately, it does not go well.
The women end up imprisoned by a murderous cult
that seeks to drain them of their adrenaline so it can be sold.
It turns out that one of the victims is a former victim of child abuse, and as a result she has superhumanly high levels of adrenaline. Yes, this seems to be an excuse to make this a new version of You're Next . In that movie, the protagonist's backstory lampshaded her ability to do whatever the scene needed to defeat the villains. In this new low-budget version, it is just an excuse for all kinds of craziness. Somehow, she is an expert in martial arts - well, the actress can do a few high kicks. She also has amazing weapon skills, although every time she picks up a gun she empties it into the nearest opponent, then throws it away so she can take on the next enemy empty-handed. It even gives her the superhuman strength necessary to physically punch her fist through a man's chest.
The third act of the story has the cultists take things to a new level. Instead of just harvesting the victims' adrenaline, they set them loose to play The Most Dangerous Game .
Camille Keaton
, survivor of the original movie forty years previously,
is attacked by the families of the men she murdered.
After
The Hills Have Eyes
and
Last House on The Left
, this is yet another remake of a classic 1970s rape-revenge Z-Movie.
Yes, just what the world needs - not!
A privileged middle-class woman ( Sarah Butler ) goes to an isolated cabin in the woods, just like in all the best slasher films. She is menaced by some working-class men, who subject her to an attack not entirely un-reminiscent of Deliverance.
Does she do what Jodie Foster did in The Accused, or what victims do every week in Law & Order: SVU? No, she goes on a rampage that owes as much to torture-porn like the Saw Series as it does to the original film this is based on. Think Turistas AKA Paradise Lost - but the bikini babe is the murderer while the yokels (white, not Brazilian, so it is not racist) are the victims.
This follows the same general storyline as the original film,
but with a few minor changes.
Instead of being set in the backwoods of the USA it takes place in Eastern Europe,
so they can use cheap locations and a cast of unknowns.
Even more so than the first film, that is.
The violent aspects of the film are exaggerated beyond all realism. One victim is cornered in the most filthy bathroom ever - seriously, this place has never been flushed never mind cleaned! And the girl somehow overpowers a man twice her weight and carries him around.
The protagonists from the first two movies
meet up at a rape crisis centre.
They bond over a mutual mistrust and hatred of men,
and express wonder at how the men must treat the women in their lives.
Nobody points out that in a gender-segregated world,
the men have no female influence in their lives.
Small wonder that their masculinity is regarded as toxic.
This is a watchable horror film,
and the reason it flopped on original release
is because it was poorly marketed.
It was written by Diablo Cody,
best known for the critically acclaimed Juno.
She delivers a lot of her trademark snappy dialogue.
This film follows some of the rules of the traditional horror movie. For example, the protagonist is a Final Girl ( Amanda Seyfried ) and the antagonist is a demonic monster that kills teenagers. However, the monster does not chase gorgeous cheerleaders like Jennifer ( Megan Fox ) - she IS the monster!
Jennifer is abducted by a music band, who sacrifice her as part of a Satanic pact. Unfortunately she is not a virgin, so she comes back as a demonic monster. This is a typical setup for a rape-and-revenge story. What makes it a more typical horror movie is the fact that instead of seeking revenge on her abusers, she attacks innocent victims like Kyle Gallner ( Beautiful Creatures ).
The Final Girl is Jennifer's nerdy friend, Needy. Their friendship, and its degeneration as the story progresses, is the core of the film. In other words, this is really an inferior version of Ginger Snaps .
The real problem with the film is that it seems uncertain of what genre it is. It is set up as a thriller, but the Second Act lacks conflict between the leads so it is really a drama. The title character's backstory is intended as sympathetic, but she is clearly the antagonist. This at least allows the reactive protagonist to shine.
Josie (
Sophie Turner
), a tweenage girl, moves into a trailer park.
The manager (Dylan McDermott -
King Richard (2021)
) takes an interest in her.
Augusta (
Brit Marling
) and her sister Louise (
Hailee Steinfeld
) live on a slave plantation in Dixieland, USA.
Moses (Sam Worthington - Clash of the Titans ) and his fellow Union soldiers are in the area, looking to free the slaves. For some reason, this film casts them as the bad guys.
This is based on the trope of the Final girl.
A bunch of tweenagers go camping in the woods,
and got massacred by a masked man with a machete.
Naturally, only one girl survived.
Years later, the survivor is still suffering from PTSD. She works in a drycleaners, and befriends a male cow-orker. Unfortunately someone starts to stalk her, dressed as the original killer.
Has the original killer come back for revenge? Is she being gaslighted by a copycat? Or is this a case of the untruthful narrator, when it turns out that the protagonist and antagonist are the same person?
Things hot up in the final act, when we find out who the killer is. The climax is a kill-crazy massacre, which makes up for the lacklustre suspense of the previous hour.
Camille Keaton
, best known as the woman in
I Spit On Your Grave (1978)
, is once again hassled by a group of working-class men
who corner her in her
Cabin In the Woods
. This time there are only three of them,
and they are simply trying to pressure her into selling her house to their father.
The rape may not happen, but the revenge is certainly a thing. In fact, it is pre-emptive so it is not really revenge.
The nuns are nude because they work in a cocaine-processing factory.
Unfortunately, one of them tries to double-cross a motorcycle gang.
The result - two dead nuns, and one more ends up naked in the bikers' brothel.
This is all a setup for a Kill Bill style revenge movie. But the Mexican religious setting makes it more reminiscent of Machete . Unfortunately, while Machete is a well-aimed satire this is just low-budget and low-brow.
A young woman wakes up as a kind of Frankenstein's monster.
It turns out that she has been edited together with two other girls.
Through a series of flashbacks we discover that they were all in the same bar the night before.
Now they have to work together, three minds controlling one body,
as they try to escape and work out why they have been frankensteined together.
Power corrupts, and the girls are no exception. They use their superhuman strength to go on a killing spree. Specifically they target men they met in the bar on that night. Partly because those men are suspects in their killings, but mostly just out of mean-spiritedness.
Instead of a creepy old man, the Surgeon is a younger man. Sort of like Herbert West in Reanimator , but not such a tight-ass.
Like all good monster movies,
this is named after the monster itself.
Cassie (
Carey Mulligan
) is a predator who traps the unwary.
The obvious comparison is with Jason Voorhees,
who targets any horny tweenagers who threaten to dip their foot into his swimming hole.
Is this appraisal too blunt? What if Clancy Brown (The Kurgan in Highlander (1986) ) played the lead role instead of her father, and had a gender-neutral selection of victims? Perhaps the closest thing to this is Jennifer's Body , another empowering female-led horror movie which, had it not been sunk by a terrible marketing campaign, might have received the same acclaim as this film.
Margot Robbie produced this movie, but turned down the lead role because it would bring too much comparison with Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey . A better comparison might be between PYW and Joker (2019) , which similarly explores mental illness and revenge. It also compares well with Dead Man's Shoes . In contrast, BOP is simply an attempt at creating a female Deadpool .
In the second act, the main character starts to get over her mental issues. She chooses to be in a relationship with a boy she knew in college. The movie changes tone, and becomes a parody of rom-com films.
This leads into the final act, where expectations are subverted several times. It is all cleverly done, but it is not as clever as some people seem to think.
Is this a long-awaited critique of raunch culture of the first decade of this century? Well, Veronica Mars did it first, and did it better. Secondly, that raunch culture was the freedom-loving Girl Power of the Nineties which was destroyed by Nipplegate and the Religious Right in the USA.
Margaret (
Rebecca Hall
) is a single mother and successful career woman.
She is a parent to a seventeen-year-old girl,
and mentor to a young woman in the office.
She is also a control freak,
and it turns out she has deep-seated emotional issues.
One day she catches sight of a figure from her past,
and begins to mentally unravel.
Margaret reveals her backstory to the office girl, in a breathtaking scene. She was once in a relationship with David (Tim Roth - She Hulk ), a sociopathic narcisist capable of unbelievable violence. Now, after decades, he is stalking her. She tries to turn the tables on him, but he is always a step ahead of her in their game of cat-and-mouse. Finally she confronts him on his own terms.
This is a drama rather than a thriller, since it concentrates on the protagonist rather than her external conflict. The two leads entirely dominate it, with mesmerising performances.
A nurse (
Rosamund Pike
) becomes obsessed with an abusive man.
When he goes to prison for assaulting her, he writes letters to her.
She always returns them, marked Return to Sender.
Eventually she starts to visit him ...
This was released about the same time as Gone Girl , and because this has Pike play a low-level version of the same character this movie remained in the shadow of the other one.
A young hearing-impaired woman takes a one-person driving holiday across Arizona.
Unfortunately she runs into a gang of racist rednecks run by Rodney Rowland (
Space: Above and Beyond
). Like every survival film since
Deliverance
, things take a turn for the worse …
Evoking the Magic Negro cliché, the token Native American character is a medicine man. He tries to keep the girl’s soul in her body. Unfortunately she ends up soul-possessed by a vengeance spirit - like in The Crow , but with the spirit of Apache chieftain Mangas Coloradas instead of a demon.
Given the played-out nature of the genre and the low budget of the film, this is actually quite a watchable film.
Joan (
Angela Bettis
) is a traumatised survivor of an encounter with a serial killer.
She returns home to the small town she grew up in,
and has an extended flashback to her teenage years.
The town is so small that the only person of colour is Brandon Jay McLaren ( Tucker & Dale Versus Evil ), the Canadian actor who always fills the role in this kind of thing. Teenagers got abducted and murdered. Joan and her friend were the final girls, tortured but not sexually assaulted. Just torture porn, not pornographic torture.
In the modern day, someone starts to kill off the townsfolk. Joan sees someone dressed as the original serial killer. Is she halucinating? Is he returned from the dead? Or is it just a copycat?
The protagonist is Angela (
Rosie Day
), a deaf-mute girl who dresses like River Tam in
Firefly
. She lives in an unnamed European country
(presumably somewhere in the Former Yugoslavia, circa 1995)
where she is abducted by a Militia led by Sean Pertwee (
Gotham
).
Angela is kept in the militia's sex dungeon. She befriends one of the sex slaves, Vanya ( Dominique Provost ). Unfortunately this is not a happy-happy movie.
The result is more like I Spit On Your Grave than Die Hard, although the Final Girl does spend a lot of time climbing about in the hollow walls of the house like in the remake of Black Christmas .
A 1950s US housewife (
Noomi Rapace
) suspects that she recognises her new neighbour (Joel Kinneman -
Suicide Squad
). She is a GI bride, formerly a refugee from the Second World War,
and she thinks that the neighbour is a Nazi war criminal.
Rather than just turn him in to the authorities, the woman abducts him and tries to torture him into confessing. Her use of a hammer is reminiscent of the actress's most famous role - as Lizbo Salamander in the Swedish TV adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series.
This has been done before, and better. The basic premise is the stage-play, Death and the Maiden . It was even adapted as an episode of the TV show Evil (2019) .
This is a difficult movie to categorise.
It starts with some Fem-Jep,
when a woman gets flirted with by a man
who makes her feel uncomfortable.
The inevitable monster attack is on the male, not the female,
which is standard in the modern era of Woke Horror.
The story takes off with a male protagonist, an old CIS-gendered white-looking straight-acting man. He is a police detective, although at his age he must be a few days away from retirement. Yes, the tropes are there for him to be a supporting character - but for some reason he is the viewpoint character for the first proper scene. Anyway, his job involves surveillance on some street-level thugs who are involved in some kind of Red Room . Well, this movie could be a typical Death Game Horror effort, but the crooks' money-making scheme is kept in the background.
The main story concerns the monster, Lacey. She looks like a homeless black woman, but she has superhuman strength and healing factor. To survive she must eat human flesh and bone, so she kills men she deems to be criminals and then eats their fingers. As well as superhuman abilities, she also weighs fifty kilos more than she ought to. Lastly, she has scars on her back similar to those of Lucifer , as if she is a fallen angel of some kind. Anyway, the old detective hires her to kill crooks for him.
This is a soft reboot of a male version called He Never Died (2014) . They have the same producer, but this Distaff version has a female director - Audrey Cummings . There are a couple of token good men in this story, but every one of the good people is female. Also, they are all Caucasian - hence why the black female lead does not qualify this as Blaxploitation Horror . Finally, the main antagonist is female. Unfortunately she does not get much of a set-up as a fighter - unlike something like, say, The Hunt . As a result, the final confrontation is something of a let-down.
This was set up for a sequel. Hopefully Lacey will get to fight some supernatural monsters, since the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are mentioned, and the human villains in this are weak and un-threatening.
A career businesswoman (
Gillian Anderson
) hires a security engineer (Danny Dyer -
Plebs
) to install CCTV cameras inside her apartment.
Afterwards, she gets him to be her plus one
at an event in a remote countryside mansion.
Unfortunately, on the way home they are ambushed
by the nastiest group of yokels since
Deliverance (1971)
.
This is not just a straightforward rape-and-revenge. Part of it is the character development of Danny Dyer's character. At the start he is a harmless fellow who cannot put a dying animal out of its misery. However, by the end of the story he has evolved into a bloodthirsty killer.
Jennifer Spenser (
Sondra Locke
) hunts down and murders some hippies.
Well, they are more like ex-hippies.
The inciting incident was in 1973,
when this kind of movie was in fashion,
but it took a decade to get it made.
As a result, they are now thirty-something grown-ups.
Harry Callaghan (Clint Eastwood - ) is in charge of solving the murders. Unfortunately he causes more homicides than he solves. The prosecutor, D'Ambrosia (Carmen Argenziano - Stargate SG-1 ), has a case thrown out of court because Callaghan conducted an illegal search. The judge who throws the case is a woman - yes, just a few years after Callaghan had his first female partner, he now has women in positions of authority over him.
Callaghan gets sent to the small town where Spenser's murder spree is centred. The local Sheriff, Chief Jannings (Pat Hingle - Batman (1989) ), naturally takes a dislike to the interloper. At least Harry's partner, Horace King (Albert Popwell - ), can keep him informed in events back in the big city.
Callaghan has not softened with age. However, he updates his .44 magnum revolver to a .44 Automag self-loading pistol. Also, he adopts a new catch-phrase: Go ahead, make my day!. This was quickly adopted by Ronald Reagan, the right-winger who was then-President. The movie certainly hits a lot of right-wing talking points, with hippies and minorities as villains. However, at the start of the movie Callaghan gives away that the real problem the cops are facing is that citizens resort to crime by using violence to solve their problems. The irony is that it was the right-wingers who created a low-trust society with an everyone-for-themselves mentality.
While this is part of the Dirty Harry series, and thus Callaghan/Eastwood is nominally the protagonist, most of his screen time is spent on sub-plots. After all, several different groups of thugs want to murder him for a variety of reasons. The main storyline belongs to Spenser/Locke. At the end, the big question is ... Will Callaghan treat her as a serial killer (like Scorpio) or as a vigilante like Magnum Force?
Dawn (
Jess Weixler
), a girl with vagina dentata,
seeks revenge on potentially abusive men.
Her effeminate boy-buddy Tobey (Hale Appleman - The Magicians ) and her creepy step-brother Brad (John Hensley - Witchblade ) are on her hit list.
This is some kind of self-empowerment story for young women who wonder what it would be like if they could deter rapists by using vagina dentata. Of course, in real life women already have teeth so this is all a moot point.
Lilly (
Anya Taylor-Joy
) invites an old school friend, (
Olivia Cooke
), over to her house.
They have not kept in touch since High School.
Things take a turn for the darker when it is revealed that one of the girls has a criminal history of violence. The other one wants her to help murder an abuser. They try to hire a junkie (Anton Yelchin - Odd Thomas ) to help them, but it does not go according to plan.
It is sad to think that this is Yelchin's final film. He delivers an impressive performance in a role that is very different from anything else he had done prior to this. Unfortunately all that does is leave us with a sense of loss, since he passed at such a young age before he had the chance to fulfill his potential.
This movie sometimes gets mentioned in regard to
Promising Young Woman
. However, they are very different films
even if they do deal with similar subject matter.
This is much grittier than PYW,
which is basically a parody of the pro-sex culture
that ended with the extremist backlash to Nipplegate.
Sadie ( Olivia Wilde ) is a sadist, who gets a thrill from torturing and robbing people. What makes this socially acceptable, so the audience can get a thrill out of it without any pangs of guilt, is her choice of victims. She targets men who she is told are abusive to their wives, although one time she alters her modus operandi and targets a neglectful mother whose child is in a bad way.
The protagonist's backstory leads into the climactic third act. It turns out that her husband (Morgan Spector - ) was an abuser who taught her home-made first aid and gave her a high tolerance for pain. She also learned survivalist camping skills from him, and taught herself krav maga from a manual he owned. These skills come in useful as she tries to track him down for a final violent confrontation.
A rookie detective (
Melissa George
) and her hardboiled partner (Stellan Skaarsgard -
Dogville
) investigate a series of ritualistic torture-killings.
A young Tom Hardy ( The Dark Knight Rises ) and his mixed-race gang of street thugs once terrorised Selma Blair . Now it seems that she has come back for revenge, in a sadistic manner reminiscent of Saw .
This is set in New York City - perhaps the seediest and most unpleasant version of the city presented since Lucio Fulci's 1970s gore-fest The New York Ripper . One should note, then, that it was in actual fact mostly shot in Belfast.
The protagonist (
Kim Basinger
) is a homemaker, married to an emotionally abusive man.
She goes to the shopping mall one night,
but in the carpark she runs afoul of Chucky (Lukas Haas -
First Man (2018)
) and his 1980s-style mixed-race street-gang.
Seriously, for some reason there is one of each:
Black, Latino and East Asian.
Anyway, Chucky escalates his crimes
from misdemeanour menacing to felony gunplay.
Since the heroine is the only witness,
the gang must hunt her down and kill her
if they have any hope of evading justice.
The gang chase her into a construction site, and then the woods. She is lugging her most valued item with her - a big heavy metal toolbox! Luckily the items inside it, including a tyre iron and a screwdriver, allow her to make a couple of enthusiatic kills.
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