Shudder Crud: Women Having a Bad Day

It's that time of the month again. Time for me to recommend what's good and protect you from what isn't. Just like last time, I have 3 films about females being terrorized, because no one cares about horrors that happen to men.

There's no "final boy" trope. Our job is to get killed in the first act, or sacrifice ourselves in the second. Whether she lives or dies, the woman is the important character, and the reason why ought to be obvious. Have you seen women? They're so HOT. 

Last Straw

This one surprised me, I was expecting a typical trapped-in-one-place-with-a-scary-killer kind of movie, and it is that, but there's another element to it. Halfway through it rewinds a bit and shows the events from the killer’s perspective, so you get a sense of why he’s killin. 

The main character is flawed, and kind of bitchy, but you can understand why she’s bitchy. She’s dealing with shit, and she ends up taking it out on an employee, who is also dealing with shit. It’s a movie about different perspectives, and how simple conflicts can spiral into a catastrophic confrontation. 

The employee is an asshole and his behavior is the last straw of her shitty day, so she’s right to fire him, but from his perspective getting fired is the last straw of his shitty life, and after thinking it over while smoking some crack, he decides to do something about it.

I like that the main character is kind of unlikable at the start, she has dimensions. Her arc throughout the ordeal is really interesting, and sad too. It's a tense little thriller with cool fighting and scary violence, but there’s also some unexpected depth to it. 

Well, unexpected for me anyway, because I didn't have myself to tell me about it.

Stopmotion

I was hoping to enjoy this a lot more than I did. It was pretty boring, and mainly suffers from one major flaw. Mad God already exists, and this isn’t it. Naming the movie Stopmotion sets up certain expectations that it doesn’t really deliver on. 

This is not a film about a bunch of crazy stop-motion stuff happening. There is some stop-motion stuff that happens, I think. But none of it is particularly memorable. 

It just gets bogged down in a weird plot about some creepy girl who mind controls the main character into playing with road kill. I don’t even know what the point of it all was, but I strongly feel that it sucks.

If you’re going to call your movie Stopmotion, you better show me a whole entire fucking ass load of killer stop-motion. If you waste my time with some boring story about a lame creepy child, I’m just gonna thumb the movie down and put in my Ray Harryhausen DVD box set instead. 

If you want to attempt a film in this genre, then your film is going to be compared, by me, to the gold standard of Sinbad’s Golden Voyage, and that is not a comparison you will win. Not as far as I’m concerned. Not ever. 

Irreversible

This movie is known for one reason and one reason only, an infamously long and realistic rape scene. It’s grisly, violent, and happens in one interminable take with no music, just a lot of screaming, crying, and the echoing thump of aggressive ass-pounding. Then he kicks her in the face and punches her 50 times and smashes her head into the concrete. It’s not a good date movie. For that matter, it’s not a good movie, period. 

I’m not against an uncomfortable scene if it means something, but that would require the rest of the movie to be even remotely interesting or worth watching at all, which it absolutely isn’t. The woman has a boyfriend who tries to avenge her and just ends up killing the wrong guy. It robs you of resolution or closure, not only by letting the actual rapist get away, but by showing the attempted revenge before the rape. That’s the other thing, the whole stupid fucking film is in reverse, get it? 

So you see some guy getting brutally killed at the beginning before you even know why, and then it makes you sit through 25 unbroken minutes of ass rape. The film is deliberately as cold, ugly, and ultimately unsatisfying as it could possibly be, to leave you feeling empty and pissed off, because that’s artistic. It’s also autistic. 

There is an alternative chronological cut, also available on Shudder, so I guess it’s not so irreversible after all. Whatever flimsy statement was meant to be made by presenting the story backwards in the first place is rendered moot because they didn’t even have the conviction to stand by it. 

You can watch whichever version you prefer. But I’m telling you right now, you don’t wanna watch any version. It’s a bad, boring, hideous and pointless piece of shit whether you watch it frontways, backways, sideways, or assways.