Argh, Matey! THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA (1976)

Hey sweetie, let a man 'splain it for you: the 70s were a great time for feminist horror, though the word back then was "women's lib." It was all about being liberated --via sex, pills, books, grass, the sea, castration, and the occult, and violence, too! Paths out one's domestic bliss trap were varied and didn't all have to end in death or marriage. Horror movies latched on for the ride, but the trip would usually make the girl go Ophelia-level mad before she found she wasn't crazy at all: the whole world was a massive patriarchal cult determined to keep her 'down'.  In films like Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971), The Sentinel (1977) and Stepford Wives (1975) she's actually sane and everyone else is nuts (as in Polanski's Rosemary's Baby). In 1975's Symptoms, for example, it was the other way around (ala Polanski's Repulsion). But it turns out there's a third way (beyond Polanski's ken), where the woman is crazy and 'liberated.'  Truly a product of her moment, far outside the reaches of conventional nuclear family values, she's a heroine for her times-- sweet as applejack with a kick that could geld a stallion at thirty paces. It's not traumatic though because the people around this crazy lady genuinely love her and are, more or less, normal, or at any rate, pleasantly debauched (you know, not a bunch of drags). There's only one film like that in all of western civilizations: Matt Climber's 1976 near-cult semi-classic, The Witch who Came from the Sea. It's not hard to guess why this film has never become a big cult classic it deserves to be (or why there's no Polanski template). But now, on Prime in HD and looking good, albeit slightly faded, there's no reason not to batten down the hatches, zip up to and delve into primal Freudian/Jungian chthonic murk so thick and rich it must be good for you to get this squeamish. If you're an ally, plunge in!

I'll confess: my squeamishness when it comes to seeing females abused in movies--even if the abused, or Liam Neeson, wreaks suitable cathartic vengeance--will make me avoid a movie altogether no matter how ubiquitous it is in 'the conversation' (I still ain't seen Last House on the Left or Irreversible). My Ludovico-induced feminist liberal arts programming is too strong for such imagery not to linger in my brain, tainting all subsequent media consumed by association; I have to write vast screeds on Bright Lights to vent about it just to breathe. So I staved off seeing Witch even though it's right up my alley (if you'll forgive the expression) as far as being pro-castration (I'm no militant, but I consider Teeth too sensitive and Hard Candy too soft). Imagining a depressing 16mm treatise on child abuse and dirty wallpaper (looking dour and grungy like Romero's Season of the Witch), I avoided Witch who Came From the Sea even though I've been long drawn to Witch's poster of a defenestrating Kali Venus, rising on the foam of the castrated lovers. So I was glad it showed up on Prime looking all engorged and gorgeous.  I finally had the nerve to see it last weekend after coming home from Gaspar Noe's Climax at the Alamo, since I was already in shock (so knew I'd be, temporarily, invulnerable to further trauma).

Turns out, I had nothing to worry about. It rules!

It 'gets' it - the brutalizing way so much abuse is depicted on film clashes with the mind's ability to cover up unendurable experience in the shroud of dream and abstract memory. Thus the childhood trauma flashbacks are warped by cartoon and ocean sound effects and bizarre incongruous details that make it all too strange to feel brutalized by, instead the feeling is like remembering strange nightmares from childhood, too bizarre to be terrifying- the brain abstracting trauma until its palatable (and then splitting off a separate persona as a side effect).

Millie Perkins stars as Molly "The Mermaid," a single barmaid at a seaside dive on the beach of Santa Monica, "The Boathouse," owned and operated by the pleasantly grizzled Long John (Lonny Chapman). She's not just great babysitter to her two adoring nephews, beloved of clientele and employees, but she has the ability to 'get' good-looking men as if fishing them out of the television. Aside from headaches as her brain struggles to keep the lid on her buried incest childhood by cloaking it in all sorts of nautical imagery and oceanic sound effects, she's perfect. Maybe she's mad as a hatter, and has a weird thing for good-looking men on TV, as if they can see her from the screen, and are propositioning her. Maybe she keeps talking about her lost-at-sea captain father as some kind of omnipotent hero despite her more grounded sister who assures her kids he was a monster. But she's not 'victim' crazy, not a cringing trauma victim or a twitchy mess. She's crazy in a way that encompass sanity within itself. When a bubbly blonde actress (Roberta Collins) at the bar bemoans not being liberated, which is now a requirement for TV she glances over at Molly in her patchwork denim and declares she could be in commercials: "You look liberated." The older barmaid Doris (Peggy Furey) adds that "Molly is a saint, a goddamned American saint." Later when her nervous welfare-collecting sister Cathy (Vanessa Brown) shows up to try and convince them of the truth, "you think she's just about perfect," she says to Long John. "Yeah," he snaps back, "why not?"

We agree, thanks to Millie Perkins' dynamic, confident, warm portrayal we love her as much as the staff and her nephews do. Anything she does is all right with us. She's a goddamned American saint.

That's what makes it so tragic. Molly is a liberated saint, yes, but she has no grasp on reality, and it's not the social world's fault, it's the fault of the family dynamic that would let her vile father rule the roost in such a horrifying way (we never see if she has a mother). It's a mix of latent, incest trauma-induced schizophrenia, wherein she sees people on TV talking to her, and her childhood is--understandably--warped and blurred in a salty sea spray of nautical mythology, punctuated by deeply unsettling visions. She has a habit of being drawn to people on it or connected with television, only to then kill them or is she merely fantasizing. She presumes the latter but lately, who knows. If she hears someone is dead she announces she won't believe "if it's true or not until it's on television." As if TV isn't lying to her constantly, the men on it leering out at her, calling her forward. Her dichotomy seems to be a relaxed ease in the anonymous oceanic of the bar, and the bed of salty pirate Long John, a grizzled old reprobate who accepts Molly as she is, no strings. ("Molly is the captain of her own ship.") The bed seems to be in the bar itself, and as such it becomes a very weird uniquely 70s cool spot, with panelling and aquariums and mermaid and nautical bric-a-brac, including those painted mirrored wall tiles that are often associated with orange shag and faux rock walls.

"Her father was a god; they cut off his balls and threw them into the sea."

The ocean plays a huge part, though the film never gets out on a boat, we see the ocean outside the window, and hear it deep in the sound mix, the town where they live seems largely deserted, so shops like Jack Dracula's tattoo parlor loom with an almost Lemora-style surrealism. The flashbacks are all given a surreal, sometimes darkly comic, patina, with comically distorted or ocean sound effects as if her brain is working overtime to contextualize the most primal and odious of endured horrors in terms of oceanic myth. The sea itself becomes her father, a timeless chthonic wellspring, an ultimate signifier connecting this film to everything from Treasure Island (hence the name Long John) to Moby Dick (the local tattoo artist's long tattooed face evokes Queequeg). The soundtrack is a brilliant melange of background sound (the ocean's waves are never out of earshot) and ironic electronic counterpoint: when the melody of a sea shanty she's half-singing while going in the bathroom, the two football players tied up, is suddenly picked up and finished by the ominous soundtrack as she comes back with a razor, its the kind of darkly comic interjection that would make John Williams probably shit himself with fear ("do you shave with straight razors, or is this all going to be agonizingly slow?"). When Molly learns of Venus, born in the sea, according to one of her pursuing men, ex-movie star Billy Batt (Rick Jason - above) she says, with child-like sincerity, "You're lying to me." It's a brilliant line, she could be kidding in a cocktail party way, or it could be an indication her concepts of reality, myth and TV are hopelessly blurred together. And in fact, it's both and why not? This is the age of liberation and free-thinking - where the structure of reality is far looser than it used to be. A latent schizophrenic barmaid isn't even judged for her violent bedroom actions, but loved and accepted by those around her, neither in spite of or because of her castrative tendencies.


And as in any ocean, there are storms: when all other boundaries fail her, her oceanic visions become terrifying pictures of being tied to the mast of a free-floating raft, surrounded by dismembered male bodies, as if remembering some primal prehistoric siren past (only without a hypnotist Chester Morris pulling the strings). The split between her castrating angel of death, turned on by sadism and dismemberment, both as projection revenge against her father and tricks maybe taught by him (we never really know - or hear his voice), and her sweet aunt / fun carefree cool barmaid type is as vivid as the difference between TV and reality. "Let's get lost at sea, Molly m'lass" is what we learn her father used to say, "and we got lost at sea so many... many times." The ocean surge mirroring the rise and fall of the bedsprings - its base horror itself part Greek myth (Elektra) and part Sumerian or druid sacrificial cult, the young boy castrated and his loins thrown into the sea to ensure a good harvest of fish (or wheat if on the fields).

Long John seems somehow to be spared, to share a bed. Maybe due to his easygoing attitude, age, that he's not on TV, and his ability to be contextualized into her nautical miasma (he's a "pirate"). He certainly never reigns in her sexual adventurousness or belittles or infantilizes her. He says he's too old and experienced to get jealous, he says, and we believe him. But you know he loves her, and is willing to take her at face value, as much as he can. He's no fool though, and when he asks her when she lost her virginity and she can't remember that far back, starts stalling and getting a headache he realizes immediately and to some horror the truth; the script and film don't need to underline the moment. He gets it, and his whole demeanor changes, and so we get it too, without ever needing it heard aloud. It's a brilliantly modulated bit of acting by them both. These are smart, interesting people, with unique bonds.

THE MYSTIC ORACLE:

One thing that most horror movies, or any movies, lack is the presence of TVs. They're hard to film due to streaking, so often they're just left off, but it really spells the difference between a believable reality and this kind of utopia where people just sit around in empty kitchens waiting for their cue. Here, though we can clearly see the TV image is superimposed to avoid telltale streaking, that actually works to give the images an extra eerie frisson.  TV is a constant extrasensory, imposed presence: in her childhood memories a very creepy black-and-white clown makes all sorts of weird swimming gestures towards her, beckoning to her/us in a way that's genuinely unsettling. Watching, I had the distinct feeling some terrifying being from my own childhood dreams had found me and was beckoning me from across time and media. Other genius moments tap into LSD experiences (every hippy's schizophrenic sampler), as figures talking to the camera on TV seem to be addressing us/Molly directly. No sooner has she seduced Alexander McPeak (Stafford Morgan) after seeing him in a shaving commercial ("Don't bruise the lady,") she's receiving bizarre directives directly from his TV commercials, telling her where and how to take that razor across his jugular vein.

"He's stark naked! Everywhere... looking at me!"

It's a weird trick to pull off - Molly is a tragic figure who we don't have to 'protect' or 'fix'.  There's no evil or malice in anything she does. ("Does it help that I didn't hate any of them?" she eventually says, "except that first little bastard," she notes. "His mother sang on television," thus spelling out why perhaps he was doomed, "and he sang with her!") And that's why for me, the film really takes off, with a script that looks at the whole mythopoetic televisual-schizophrenic pie, from the raw ingredients to the final delicious slice, ocean-to-table, as it were. Rising from ocean depths to behold the facile screen and its leering Apollonian males, and find those titans in need of gelding by a dark agent of the chthonic. It's a perfect role for the right actress, and Millie Perkins is just that actress. Maybe she had a hand in creating it (she was married to screenwriter Thom, and played the senator's daughter in his AIP hit Wild in the Streets). Between her turn as Anne Frank (in 1959's Diary of Ann Frank) and as the 'woman' in Monte Hellman's The Shooting (1966), we know she's very comfortable playing strong women who are quite comfortable in situations that might make ordinary female characters cringe like crushed flowers. Molly the Mermaid is not a wuss, or one of those rote timid types that become punching bags for every bully and sadist in a 20 mile radius before finally getting down to revenging. She behaves in a way that is indicative of the kind of liberated female vibe of the decade the film is from. Though she's clearly "a mess," she's falling apart from a place of strength so beyond most modern female characters that even a mess she's more together than they are. With her voice given a druggy surreal echo or pitch-shifted to a just slightly low-enough to be eerie (not enough to be goofy or obvious), she becomes the deranged siren, as if stirred from the primordial past).

Trying to find out how this amazing film could be made, could emerge so fully formed from the frothy foam of independent horror cinema, we need to look at the credits, for both Thom and director Climber have unique outlooks on feminine strength indicated by their other films. Thom's body of work shows a latent queer eye for strong young beautiful men, fully-formed (non-objectified) females, and his films often feature a strong, domineering mother figure (as in his scripts for New World: Bloody Mama and Wild in the Streets, Angel Angel Down We Go) He's the exploitation market's Tennessee Williams, tapping into the same vein of Apollonian beauty reaching like Icarus, for the sun, swallowed up by the maternal chthonic of the devouring mother. In fact, Witch's conspicuous absence of a human mother figure allows for the sea itself (ever-present, either in the sound mix or the frame) to step into the role (and nobody does it better), its warm, forgiving maternal tide like a ceaseless flow of half-dissolved titan testes, and scuttling crustacean claws (by Gillette). Keenly aware of its archetypal resonance (yet avoiding literality), The Witch who Came from the Sea would make a great mythopoetic subtextual gender/death-swapped  double bill with Suddenly Last Summer, with Molly's sister as the Mercedes McCambridge (there's even a bit of the same speaking pattern), Long John the equivalent to Liz Taylor, and Molly herself as the dead Sebastian and hid cannibal bird beach boys, soft-swirled into one many-armed/headed deity. 

Promise me you'll think about it? Constantly?

Director Matt Climber is the other major "ally" that helps make Witch so redolent, as his love of strong female characters very much in evidence. Basically the real-life inspiration for Marc Maron's character in GLOW (there's even a passing resemblance between GLOW star Alison Brie and Perkins), between that and his 1983 Conan-ish film Hundra, about a wandering blonde Amazon warrior who teaches an oppressed group of women how to rise up and smite their bullying men, it's clear Climber's got a unique appreciation for very strong, assertive, capable women. He also loves Molly as much as Thom, Perkins, and the actors and their characters in the film do.  I love her too. I love this film.

I love the weird, uncommented on details I haven't even mentioned: the way Molly and Long John sleep downstairs in the bar, that it converts to a bedroom, one with a cigarette machine by the stairs (who doesn't want a cigarette machine in their bedroom?). We never quite figure out how that works, if the bed pulls down or something, but it doesn't matter. I love the way all the scenes have that strange 70s mirror tiling and gorgeous deep wood decor, as if they're all the same place. Things that bear examination aren't addressed, but that's to its credit. Not since Antonioni's Red Desert (1964) have commercial and private space been so subtly blurred. I love the way Climber uses the cinematic time image as a reflection of Molly's dysfunction (just a single cut could bridge years, hours or seconds, how she can seemingly commit murders in the space between taking a drink and putting the glass down). I love the seamless way she goes from being playfully sexual to totally deranged, and the subtle pitch-shifts in her voice as her inner siren emerges, voice getting low and draggy like a riptide. It's all so very fierce. I've already visited its shores three times since that fateful post-Climax night! Won't you sail away on it too? It's on Prime so there's no excuse to shun it. Not anymore. It may not put you in that tropical island mood but it will give you that old-time religion.... older than Aphrodite, older than Innana, Ishtar, Asherah and Astarte! Old enough to sail the sea without a rudder, knowing your raft is safe--at last-- in your mother's foamy talons... Adieu, Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks. Good night. At the count of three... a wake.

Square in the Maenads: 68 KILL

Trent Haaga's darker-than-black noir comedy posits, early on, that even within the cartoonish, exaggerated post-grindhouse-fueled Alamo Drafthouse-bound renegade spirit popularized in the mid-90s by Tarantino--there are rules of engagement yet to be broken. Even for characters who--like the assassins of Banquo---are so incensed by the vile blows and buffets of the world they are reckless what they do, there are hot babe messes more reckless still. For hard-working squaresville lovestruck septic man Chip (Matthew Gray Gubler), roped by crazy hottie stripper girlfriend Liza (AnnaLynne McCord) into robbing one of her johns (of $68,000 - hence the title), that line of relative decorum is obliterated fairly early on, but... 

I can't say more, for to spoil even one twist or turn on this wild ride is to lessen its blunt force impact. Suffice it to say, for we fans of strong assertive women (those who score along the Hawks-Meyer GF spectrum rather than the 'strong-willed mother-type' Ford-Spielberg curve), this bonanza of badassery is--especially in the time of plunging markets and collapsing governments--something we desperately need. Why wait for a normal woman to be brutalized before turning savage? That, to me, is sexist, inferring a woman needs a man's cruelty to light her inner bomb's fuse. 

From hence forth let mentally remembering the numerical combination of your client's safe suffice as a sufficient excuse for unleashing your inner shredding and devouring maenad upon him. McCord is so turned on by his death throes it looks almost like she's inhaling his departing soul like a hit off the crack pipe.

Liza with her weird brother Dwayne (Sam Eidson)

90s ANTI-MORALITY RETURNS:

When I was around five years-old, I was--for a brief and intense few weeks--obsessed with the dubbed Japanese anime cartoon SPEED RACER. It wasn't because I loved it but because it was the only thing on, every day after school like clockwork. I watched it, but I hated the good guy, 'Speed', and hated his stupid monkey and mustachioed sidekick and their ridiculous Pizza guy striped caps. I found it unfair that the way-cooler bad guys (always in  black shades) never won a single goddamned race. I was too young to know the game was fixed. I kept sticking around because I figured just once the cool guys in black just had to get lucky.

Every day I'd await it on afternoon TV, sure that this one time the guys in black would win. My fury mounted as the weeks passed. 

Finally my mom, sensing my mounting frustration, explained the terrible truth - the good guy always won. The game was rigged. I felt sick to my stomach and never watched SPEED RACER again. 

I mention that memory to explain the euphoria that overtook me--and audiences around the world--25 or so years later, when the murderous outlaws of True Romance, Bound, The Last Seduction, Natural Born Killers, and Pulp Fiction started winning. Surviving past the credits used to be all but impossible for gangsters and murderers --it was a given they'd be shot to pieces or hauled off in chains. Beloved 80s-early 90s crime characters like Scarface, Baldwin in Miami Blues, Thelma and Louise, and Walken's King of New York had all had to die at the end - even though it was clear the cool directors hated this pre-ordained (by ancient censorial codes) necessity. In the early 90s, old ideas of moral code collapsed at the feet of Tarantino, Rodriguez, Stone, Dahl, Armitage, and Tony Scott. It was a victory not only for crime but for the haters of cliche. That killers always pay for their crimes was a rule made by preachy moralists who think audiences are too stupid to get that this is all just a movie, that 'rooting' for bad guys will make us go out and commit crimes - monkey see, monkey do. Showing cool gangsters living past the credits, reaping the rewards of their crimes, implied good faith in audience reactions. It's that same faith hat's paradoxically inherent in the low bar sense of morality we find in 68 Kill.

We don't get that vibe so much anymore, the feeling of cinematic killing as a kind of liberation from moral conscription --we're too crushed up in PC remorse. All our big screen killers tend to be pedophile shadow people now. Cinematic criminal sexuality is no longer 'fun' --it's a two-way prison, where a victim of childhood abuse grows up to abuse children. Crime has lost its sexy bubble gun snap. Sinematic violence is now 'felt' with a sickening bone-break chill rather than as a pop culture splash page. We had Spring Breakers a few years back, and occasionally a Tarantino film, but where can badass alpha bitch psycho monster hotties go to unfurl their random violent urge flags these days, I mean really unfurl them, not in some half-assed tough day at the office meltdown but genuine homicidal merriment? 

There was a villainess in Wonder Woman --all scarred up and ready to go--but then comes the cop-out: she turns out to be just a love-starved, disfigured chemist gone awry. Where are the Kali archetypes? Where is the Red Queen? Where is the Catwoman who revels in her diabolism the way Julie Newmar used to, rather than Anne Hathaway versions. the types that set about morosely stealing just to help her sister, or exonerate her record, or help some blind nephew go to Juilliard? Where are the Bridget Gregorys, the Tura Satanas? The Angels of Death?

Don't sweat it, man -- they're here.

Played by AnnaLynne McCord, main psycho stripper/killer Liza is a super confident, cash-hungry predator with a wild lion's mane of hair and a live-for-today attitude that's all the better for being underplayed rather than hammed up. She savors the death rattles of her victims rather innocently but seems to actually care about Chip, to forgive him his trespasses, to look forward to taking him out for a wild flight from Dodge with a stolen bankroll and maybe finally use the "L" word back at him. In her uninhibitedly sexual and violent way she could be who either Vanessa Hudgens or Ashley Benson from Spring Breakers grow into if they drop out of college and move inland to continue their life of sex and violent crime, becoming more and more nympho-homicidal, each taking in a cute lost puppy boyfriends who idealize them as perfect angels. Evoking the composed beauty of the femme fatales in The Last Seduction, Girly, Gun Crazy (or more recently, Amber Heard in All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and Machete Kills), with the stripper-gone-legitimately-wild carnality of one of the go-go dancing drag stripper threesome in Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!, Liza is a keeper you'll want to bring home to terrorize mom with, or at least savor her every line of dialogue over multiple viewings.

And she's only one of a whole parade of amok, strong female alpha bitches to come: freed hostage Violet (Alisha Boe) lures Chip into a playful team sing-a-long to "Pop Pop / Pop Music", and later Sheila Vand (the lead in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) takes over as the psychotic emo chick Monica, the cooler-than-thou deadpan gravel-voiced punk alpha bitch ringleader of a small meth and prostitution and whatever else pays the dealer and landlord gang of trailer-dwelling nutcases, including great turns by Hallie Grace Bradley, who dryly impels Chip to go down on her in back of the convenience store in exchange for information on his missing car, and Lucy Faust as an expertly cackling young tweaker called Skinny. 

Vand's Monica is so good with that low register druggy southern drawl it's like she talks and moves via an inner green slime-soaked slinky tied to a high voltage electric hum. She alone would make the film a must. And like every other girl in the film, she can't resist messing with Chip's squaresville puppydog mind. 

We may roll our eyes at Chip's idealizing cluelessness, may wonder how he can take so many golf club swings to the head but still keep most of his teeth and all his eye socket structural integrity, but--and this is a hard thing to pull off--we still like old Chip because we see through his beaming eyes how golden and irresistible Liza's skin glows in in the morning light as she sleeps; how the sun filters through the colors of their head shop tapestry curtain blanket and brightens every hidden purple in her hair and kimono; how even her teeth and gleaming are her teeth (1). We feel his rage and confusion, too, because we know what it's like to be so suggestible (or I do, at any rate), but--unlike other fall guys Chip's been compared to, like whiny Jeff Daniels in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild or smarmy Griffin Dunne in Scorseses's After Hours or Peter Berg's hick with a too-good-for-this-town pretensions in Last Seduction--we don't consider his squeamishness to be cowardice or a lack of adventuresome spirit but the work of a crisis within his sweet nature--conscience grinding gears with his smitten rapture. He means well, but every new tattooed girl casting him a come-hither look is just another ounce of sweet kryptonite. Lovestruck by nearly every set of female eyes he sees, the only thing saving him from the latest femme fatale is the next, even deadlier one, waiting around the next bend.

That's why it's so important that 68 Kill (terrible name, great movie) came out the same year as Wonder Woman, The Beguiled, Lady Bird, and The Love Witch. It's like 1994 all over again but with the focus square on the women. Now the women don't have to even be sociopaths to conquer the terrain. Now they do it so surefootedly it's like all of feminism up to now have been as little effeminate 'eh-heh' cough.

Those films are all made by women though, whereas --like Rob Zombie before him--Kill's writer-director Haaga grew up in a trashy trailer park, and it shows, not in a bad way, but in a way that captures the scuzzy low-fi vividness of the scene, only unlike Zombie, he does it without our eyes ever feeling soiled by grim misogyny and torture porn. Haaga got his start writing stuff (and I use the word loosely) like Citizen Toxie, so you know he knows how to deliver thrills far outside the morality-taste spectrum that so blandifies his fellows (Zombie included - where the murdering white trash have thin little nonsmoker suburban voices and perfect dental work and the violence scans as mean-spirited misanthropy rather than breezy black comic fun).  68 Kill might be violent and trashy but it has a summery feel that says 'oh, lighten up Scott Tobias! (2) 

We're not in "reality' while watching movies. We're through the grindhouse mirror spectrum, where the colors are a little more vibrant (it looks like it was shot on actual 35mm film with popping colors and super rich flesh tones).  The score, by Frank Ilfman and James Griffiths, uses all sorts of twangy guitars and rumbling synths it evokes all the right past motifs: some dashes of guitar echo swamp haze, and a sense of love and joyful innocence continually revived and re-drowned in the saw mill molasses sea.

Either way,  if a trailer park in every neighborhood in the coming disaster-stricken country of ours means more crime movies like 68 Kill. I can only trust the fourth wave will recognize the strength behind its crudity rather than get so pious it drowns the neighborhood with the bathwater. To paraphrase Nigel Tuffnel, when a man sexually abuses a woman, that's sexist, when a woman does it to a man - that's social justice. Maybe that's not being honest about real female personae, but this is the movies, man. It's just drag. If we can't let our hair down here, we're going to go bald from stress. We used to be adults...we can be both NPR listeners and as aggressive and combative as the red state chimera. Sometimes, well, sometimes, if you're a real American, and maybe a liberal but not a total beta cuck, you got to look at your right wing Arizona-dwelling kid brother's gun collection over Xmas and, instead of rolling your eyes and waving pictures of dead schoolchildren, feel the heat of the cool, the thrill of the target range recoil. You gotta look at your bro and say, damn right, brother, damn right. After all, a lot of shit's gone down but we're still here. If America's gonna get it together we gotta learn how to enjoy each others' outlets. A little PCP-laced oregano, an AR-14, and thou. 

Whatever testy little snipes you may have about the right wing lunatic fringe, at least they know who they really are --they're killers. We in the blue states close our eyes to the abbattoir even as we grab the grass-fed fillet mignon. To quote German freelance terrorist Wulfgar Reinhardt (Rutger Hauer - 1981's Nighthawks), "we're not heroes, we're victims! " The white heterosexual man will not share his toys, he'd rather break 'em. So let's break him first, for he is the hypnotized toy of any Fox wily enough to shake a tail feather-covered snake rattle.

Further Reading:

I. ANGELS OF DEATH
II: Great Women of Horror
III: Badass Brunette Edition
IV: Lynn Lowry Special Edition 
V: Magic Slut Split/Subject Edition
VI. Girl Mummies
VII: FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!
VIII: Good, Bad, and Beyond
IX: Lullaby of Broadway (special)\

ALSO:
TRUCK STOP WOMEN (1974)
EL MONSTRO DEL MAR (2010)
GIRLY (1970)
LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945)
SPIDER BABY (1968)
HONEY WEST
CHARLIE'S ANGELS (1976-79)
Salute to Beatrice Dalle (Hey BETTY BLUE, come blow your Mind!)
Babes of Wrath: Dangerous Women of the New Depression
Ich liebe dich so, Anita Pallenberg
Top Ten Acidemic Women 2010
Hot German Blondes Rule Space: STAR MAIDENS, ELEOMA, IM STAUB DER STERNE
Tiffany Bolling!
WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA
PJ Soles in ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL

Catty-Cool Susan Cabot

NOTES:
1.as with Rob Zombie's similarly comic-grotesque Devil's Rejects, the big give-away that these are actors, not real trailer trash, is their perfect teeth; but I think I speak for everyone when I say, thank heaven Rob let that detail go unfixed
2. If you check out RT or wheveer, a blurb from him pops up calling it nearly a de facto remake of After Hours [that] keeps the hostility and loses the self-deprecation, which turns it into an example of misogyny rather than an examination of it.  But Scott, your implying Scorsese's film isn't misogynist, which is absurd. Go look amongst thy Scorsese discs for a real live alpha bitch and see how far ya get. PS- Sharon Stone in Casino don't count (loud does not equal strong). But the ladies of Hagga-ville? I'm more worried about the fate of their drugs. Those poor suckers never had a chance.