It's the freakin' weekend and baby I'm about to have some revenge
Hey party people! (is a thing I would say, were I Taylor Vaughn in She's All That),
There are fewer well-paired things like the weekend and a good block of mind-melting cinema. Also it's 88 degrees of UV punishment outside so I'm happy to stay inside where the only cancer I'll be absorbing is probably from the Freon leaking through my air conditioner.
Now, I love a good horror suspense thriller, no holds bar on gore/weird stuff but please having a compelling plot. Please have characters that have a satisfying arc. Please let me feel a feel that doesn't involve pity or "this was a totally avoidable situation."
And you know what? The best type of film to check those boxes are REVENGE FILMS, particularly ones when women get revenge. It's satisfying, it's sexy, it gives me all relevant knowledge to keep in mind should I ever be in a similar situation, so help me Gourd.
Here are some of my favorite "women getting revenge" films in no particular ranking (because women do not exist to compete with one another, ya heard?) that you would do well to rent/stream this weekend if you are into this sort of thing:
We have all seen the original and while it's a classic and all that, frankly, watching Sissy Spacek get bullied by a bunch of shitty girls with boy names and her abusive bible-thumping mom only to DIE at the end is frankly pretty disappointing for me. The prom telekinetic-massacre scene was kind of bittersweet because some of the good folks who were nice to Carrie also bit it and like, I get that when you're having a psychotic episode with telekinetic powers it's probably difficult to focus but... come on. That nice gym teacher lady went to bat for you throughout this whole film, Carrie, and you keeeeeeled her without a second thought!
The 1999 sequel to Carrie stars Francie from Gilmore Girls as Carrie's secret half-sister. But hold up, she's GOTH and COOL and doesn't take shit. When her BFF, Lisa (the beautiful and underutilized Mena Suvari), commits suicide because some jock, Eric (fuckin' Eric, man), slept with her as a game that jocks play to collect teenage girls' virginity and then dumps her (why are there so many movies where teenage boys do this? Is this a thing that happens IRL? Jeez!), Carrie 2, AKA Rachel, blows up the asshole's spot to a guidance counselor and sheriff who are smartly deduce "Uh we can totally charge him with statutory rape because ew." This obviously upsets the jocks, who do the only thing they know how and bully Rachel into not telling. And then a car hits her dog, but sensitive jock, Jesse, is driving by and helps her get the dog to a hospital, making Rachel think that jocks aren't all bad.
Anyway, the rape part gets buried for white people reasons and Jesse is actually into Rachel which pisses off popular cheerleader Tracy because this movie needs more people being mean to our goth heroine. The jocks want to get back at Rachel for tattling even though no consequence came to the statutory rapist and sociopath, Eric, and plan to tape Jesse and her having sex to humiliate her (also illegal!) which somehow goes down smoothly for them. The jocks pretend to be nice to her and invite her to a party where teens are dancing to swing music (prob because of that Gap commercial where swing music became hip again in the 90s for a blip) and play the sex video for all to see, as Tracy distracts Jesse with her body-ody-ody.
And thennnnn they're all taunting and slut-shaming Rachel (the classic "They're all gonna laugh at you!" from the original Carrie ringing out) before her thorny heart tattoo goes full metal jacket and turns her into Heavy Metal Rachel, in which she justly (well it feels this way after all the excessive cruelty towards her) slaughters everyone, except for a fashionably late Jesse. She sees the part of the video where Jesse says he loves her and plays it over and over with her telekinesis probably like two times too many (we get it, he really does love her, okay?) and spares his life as she is pinned by the crumbling house and engulfed in flames.
Fast-forward to Jesse in college. He's taken in her dog because he is a Good Guy™, and then a dream/nightmare sequence in which Rachel appears to him and then creepily becomes a dusty corpse shakes him awake. Whatever Uta Hagen method acting Jason London was doing in that very moment was pretty effective because damn if that's not a devastatingly haunted-looking man.
THE END
Kill Bill Vol I & II (2003/2004)
Obbbbbbbbviously. I don't have to go on about this one because it's been so pop-cultured that if you don't know it by now there is no helping you. Lady assassin gets betrayed by her assassin clique, beaten nearly to death on her wedding day as she's knocked up, doesn't die, wakes from a years-long coma, picks off every last assassin clique member in the course of two very long films and many violent fight sequences and montages. Oh and her baby lived! And she's super cute! Spoiler alert: She does indeed kill Bill.
And then everyone went out and bought those yellow and black Asics Onisuka Tiger sneakers. Props to the costumer designer.
Okay, this one is tough to watch. You THINK it's about revenge but then that shit goes way deep and twisted and it's not even about that anymore. A lot of messed up stuff happens. All in french subtitles. In the end religious zealots are to blame (naturally).
In the beginning you see 10-year-old Lucie escape this super creepy dungeon where she and other little girls are being tortured for seemingly no reason. She gets out, gets taken in by an orphanage where she is understandably traumatized beyond belief. She hallucinates a demonic creature who represents the other girls she couldn't save when she escaped. Her BFF, Anna, sticks with her though because Anna is an orphan saint. Lucie vows to get revenge on whoever did that to her and other girls and 15 years later does just that with Anna's help.
HOWEVER. TWIST! It's not just a one-and-done revenge situation. Once you think Lucie's gone and busted them up... her and Anna discover just how/why this happened and oh man is it some dark shit. But honestly, as far as horror movies go, these two female leads deserve Oscars or Césars, as they do in France. You do not understand the concept of ride or die friendship until you've seen this. And you know, on the bright side, it could very well be a touching film about the strength of women friendships. I've heard wind of a 2015 American remake but the trailer looks SO BAD AND DISAPPOINTING I do not endorse watching that version.
This poster is a great summary of what this movie's about. A precocious and possibly typecast Ellen Page is an adorable plucky and innocuous-seeming tween, luring an internet pedophile into a twisted game of "who's the real psycho here?" They cyber-flirt, they meet, you worry for her naive little self for a bit, but then she's got him tied to a table and does all that psychobabble about the other little girls he's pedophiled and there's a fake-out castration scene, lots of chase and bargain and mental gotcha moments before Ellen Page goads Patrick Wilson to kill himself or else she exposes his secrets (that he and another man raped and murdered a missing girl). He hangs himself just as his ex-girlfriend is rolling up and lives long enough to hear Ellen Page go, "Sike!"
If you can't tell by the title, this woman's arc of vengeance is pure and practiced. Basically, the Lady in Lady Vengeance, Lee Geum-ja, goes to prison after being convicted of murdering a school child. A child! But while in prison, she does her best Mother Theresa impression to get released early and without suspicion of doing another crime. And THEN she hunts down the man who actually did murder that boy, plus other children, and get all the PTA (all parents of the children he murdered) involved in his elaborate and violent torture/murder. Also this eyeshadow is DOPE. Props to the key makeup artist.
Pretty much everyone knows this film because the 90s are back and everyone's into Natalie Portman's 90s look. Also something about teenage girls with guns. The Professional AKA Leon (that's the French title, I believe) is mostly about Leon, the titular assassin but Mathilda steals the show, a 12-year-old whose whole admittedly rotten family gets murdered by gangsters. She's stewed about her 6 year old brother though, an innocent, also murdered. She meets Leon after seeking refuge in his neighboring apartment and learns that he's a professional hitman and begs him to teach her. He denies her in his dismissively french accent at first but then the big softie is all d'accord and they get to training. The end goal? Off Gary Oldman, crooked cop and bad dude. Leon ends up blowing up pre-Sirius Black Oldman at the cost of his life and Mathilda is the tragic survivor yet again. This is actually pretty sad all around when you think about that. On the one hand a sequel could be cool but on the other, nah. Best to let it lie.
If you watch ALL these films this weekend, WOW you should probably take a break every now and then so you don't get some sort of thrombosis. Or just space it out, you know. I mean, there are TONS more great "women get revenge" horror/thriller films out there but I haven't seen them all. I would however totally take recommendations.
Okay, I am gonna go outside now and get a smoothie or something. Lates!
xx Sable