Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-9584883-20150217160417/@comment-4849011-20150219001448

For the record, I do understand why this story would have brutal payback. I know that the vengeful specter of a rape-murder victim isn’t just going to sneak up on her target, give him a hard pinch in the back of the neck, and leave. Speaking of violence in movies, here’s a story Roger Ebert told about I Spit on Your Grave. While he reviewed both the original and the remake (and described the outright disturbing reaction some of the audience members had toward the rape and violence), this comes from his review of a 1980 movie called Prom Night.

“What’s amazing is that despite these subhuman viewing conditions [He had described how, on one of the hottest nights of the year, the theater had no air conditioning or ice], there was a large crowd, and most stayed until the end. What was the attraction? Well, Prom Night was playing on a double bill with I Spit on Your Grave – which had been held over after the reviews hailed it as one of the sickest movies of all time.

I arrived early for Prom Night, sat through the last twenty-five minutes of I Spit on Your Grave, and got a bizarre surprise: The movie had been extensively edited since I’d seen it last, and a great deal of the most offensive violence was missing. In the scene where the heroine castrates the rapist in the bathtub, for example, there was now only one brief shot of the bloody victim. All the shots of him thrashing about in the bloody water were missing, as was a later shot of her mopping up the blood with towels.

How do we interpret the fact that the movie was secretly edited in mid-run? The movie was beneath contempt in the first place. But for exhibitors to hold it over on the basis of its reputation for nauseating violence – and then to show a censored version without that violence – is a species of doublethink too diseased for me to penetrate.”

I agree; that is terrible. Say what you want to about Roger Ebert, but you never had to guess how he felt about the films he reviewed. He gave Prom Night one-half of a star, concluding, “If you have an appetite for violence and the macabre, at least try to satisfy it in a movie done with artistry and craftsmanship – Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill, for example. Prom Night should be cut up to make bookmarks.” He also noted, “One typical killing went this way: bloody murder, followed by a loud disco song and a cut to a bloodred bowl of punch. Barf.” No word on whether it was the bloody punch bowl or the loud disco music that inspired his feeling of nausea. I'm going to take a stab in the dark here and guess that the song was not "Staying Alive".

Going along with what I was talking about earlier, here’s an excerpt from his review for a 1972 film called Puppet on a Chain. “When they kill a person, for example, they paint up a doll so it looks like the person and then they hang the person and the doll next to each other. Dying is very important in the world inside Alistair MacLean’s head, you see. A man must die with style or he is not a man – not a stylish man, anyway. Nobody dies in bed, except, of course, under unspeakable circumstances. Nobody is shot if he can be garroted, garroted if he can be run down by a speedboat, or ran down by a speedboat if he can be double-crossed by a twenty-two-year-old girl pretending to be a mentally retarded heroin victim with the IQ of a child [This was when the term “mentally retarded” was commonly used. I have an old encyclopedia with an article saying the the two types of mental handicaps were "mental retardation" and "mental illness". It’s still used at times today, but terms such as “intellectually disabled”, “intellectually challenged”, and “developmentally disabled” are preferred nowadays]. You see how it works.” That same book (I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie) also has reviews for movies called Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Rape Squad, and The Switchblade Sisters. No joke. www.rogerebert.com