Showing posts with label exploitation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label exploitation. Show all posts

Saturday, September 19, 2026

The Passion of Zoë Tamerlis Lund

I did some writing a some years ago for a webzine called Film and Fishnets which appears to be defunct. Navigating to the url of my articles returns a "website expired" message, so that's that, I guess. I keep everything I write, though, so I'm going to be recreating those pieces here by and by. These are some of my favorite pieces among my own writing and I'm happy to share them on my own site. I hope everyone else who wrote or created art for the venue has kept their work, too. It was an interesting experiment.


About fifteen minutes in to Bad Lieutenant, the 1992 film Zoë Tamerlis Lund wrote for Abel Ferrara, there’s a cut between a scene in which her character is smoking heroin with Harvey Keitel’s title character and the scene that is the motivating catalyst of the film’s plot. It’s an abrupt jump cut as the scene changes to a shot that finds a statue of the Virgin being toppled as a nun is being raped. Having just watched Lund and Ferrara’s first film together, Ms. 45, in which Lund’s rape-victim/vigilante goes on a rampage at a Halloween party while dressed as a nun, this juxtaposition jumped off the screen as something more than just narrative, as something metacinematic and significant. In context it encapsulates Zoë Lund’s cinematic anima in a single cut.

Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Careful With That Ax

Nicolas Cage in Mandy (2018)

The day after I saw Mandy (2018, directed by Panos Cosmatos), I posted a knee-jerk reaction on social media to the effect that it was "the movie you might get from a couple of stoner kids after snorting crank off the cover of an old issue of Heavy Metal, which might be interesting if it was even remotely watchable. Unfortunately it's not." Or something like that. I forget the exact wording. I should probably expand on that, because I'm usually not that out of patience with movies. I'm not even usually out of patience with Nick Cage at his most deranged, either--I loved Mom and Dad, which has performances so broad that it's a wonder any of the scenery remained intact, and even stuff like Season of the Witch and Bad Lieutenant: Port of New Orleans. Mandy, by contrast, rubbed me the wrong way. It's a film that conceals a dearth of ideas with suffocating style, which can work sometimes, but which here usually conceals the basic images of its shots.

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Hard Femme

Matilda Lutz in Revenge (2017)

When first we see Jen, the heroine of Coralie Fargeat's blood-soaked rape/revenge fantasy, Revenge (2017), she's the very picture of a sex kitten, done up like Sue Lyon in Lolita and sucking provocatively on a lollipop. Just a few minutes later comes a scene in which she goes down on Richard, her rich, married boyfriend. And then further scenes of her playing the cocktease to Richard's hunting buddies, who have shown up a day earlier than expected. Jen is high femme, dressed in crop tops and sexy underwear and a dress that is cut down to her belly button and gaudy star-shaped earrings. She is an avatar of the kind of girl/woman our culture expects to be raped. Our culture despises what she is: a construction of girly femininity that's designed to titillate the male gaze. If the rape in this movie had played out as it might in "real" life, the defense attorneys for her rapists might have asked, as a legal defense, if she was asking for it and a jury might have decided that, yes, she was. Women like Jen aren't allowed to say no.