Top 10-ish Games of 2021-ish

 

 

This is the first year in awhile where I truly loved every game on my Top 10 Best Games List. Whereas my annual Top 15 Movies List is always drowning in riches, with ten or movie great-great movies not making the cut, I often struggle with the Games List. Last year I only had six or seven games I truly loved. I'll end up putting games I only kinda liked on there. Last year, I only respected Final Fantasy VII Remake and there was a good reason I did not finish CrossCode. That's not the case this year. No filler, no fat, only great games.

Now is truly a 2021 list? As the games industry grows less and less regular with an annual cycle, I suppose that question will only get weirder as time goes by. We might have to add a few epicycles into our model of the universe to keep a 2021-centric view that makes mathematical sense. My Top 10 Games of 2021 include one game that will not be truly released for many years now, one game from 2009, two games from 2019, and one game from 2020.

This is also probably the most Eric Fuchs list of video games I've ever made. Metroidvanias make the list every year, as do VNs, as do JRPGs. A lot of games on this list are Eastern-style RPGs, one Western RPGs and a ton of action RPGs. Never mind how vague those genre terms are getting these days. I'll add some epicycles to that view of the universe too. Writing this list, I used the word "Zelda" ten times or so. Square Enix is on here three times.

I do worry with my gaming habits that perhaps I am limiting myself and my scope of experience. This past year I owned Cyberpunk 2077 and never opened it. I bought Deathloop at a full $70 price and played two hours of it before losing interest. Maybe neither of those games belong on a Top 10 List due to their own merits or lack there of. But I couldn't honestly tell you. I'm told Monster Hunter Rise, Forza Horizon 5, and Age of Empires 4 are incredible. However, they are games not for me. There's nothing mobile, no open world extravaganzas, and very little that needed next-gen hardware despite this being the first full year of the PlayStation 5 era. Does this increasingly narrow band of gaming make me a worse critic? Sure, probably. But when I write about movies, I'm probably going to care more about gross horror flicks than documentaries or comedies. I like what I like, I'm 31-years-old, my back hurts sometimes. At a certain point, you have nothing to prove to anybody by playing a roguelike when you hate roguelikes.

Still, one thing I will not say is that this is an uninteresting collection of games. Even in a more narrow genre scope, I still found what I believe to be the fantastic experiences. If "Zelda"and "RPG" are a dirty words in your book, then maybe this isn't the list for you. You do not have to like what I like. We can still be friends.

2021 was a disappointing year for a lot of reasons. It seemed like a fresh start and ended up being another round in endless sociopolitical trench warfare, just globally. I cannot say the state of the gaming industry is trending in the right direction, I definitely can't say the state of the world is trending in the right direction. But I cannot worry too hard about the existential horror of Microsoft buying out the entire industry or the reckless capitalist nightmare that is NFTs, because if those change the universe, that's years down the line. I might as well try to stop the continents from shifting because I like how the current map looks. Years, industries, the states of society, it's all far beyond me and my powers. 

For now, at least gaming is still a safe space. It's more creative, more creative, more fun space making better products than it made a decade ago. For now at least, things look pretty okay... maybe. Anyway, let's get to the list.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 31: Titane

2021! CURRENT YEAR!

Had a rough choice here to decide what movie to cover for the 2021 choice. I have seen tons of great horror movies this year, some this very month. It could have been Antlers, it could have been Lamb, it could have One Night in Soho. It wouldn't have been Halloween Kills because that movie is apparently really bad. I could have dug back a bit and covered Saint Maud or Green Knight or Psycho Goreman or Malignant, all fun movies. Nobody is talking about the Rebecca Hall horror movie, The Night House, and that movie is terrifying. I could have done the new Mike Flannigan series on Netflix, Midnight Mass, which I loved. Still need to see Squid Game. 2021 is a great year for horror. A Quiet Place Part II kicked more ass than it had any right to.

But ultimately, I had to pick one film to review for the series. That's the rule: one year, one day, one movie. So it was tough. But there was really one choice. There’s only one horror movie where a lady fucked a car. Yes, you heard me right. Car fucking. That movie is Titane, directed by Julia Ducournau.

A lady fucked a car in a movie and that movie won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Now I know what you’re thinking: “How do you fuck a car? Like mechanically, what actually is going where?" Maybe you’ve seen Ridley Scott’s movie The Councilor, which had an infamous “catfish” scene. Yeah, this isn’t that. This isn’t a metaphor or an exaggeration, the lady bangs a car in a high-art French-language movie. There is no way to make realist sense of it. But you do see it happen. And the auto-erotica is probably the least fucked-up part of Titane.

Titane is the second movie from Julia Ducournau, but she is already a superstar in the extreme weird body horror subgenre. Her first film, 2016's Raw was one of my favorite movies of that year. That title says it all, it’s a movie about urges and hungers, for both food and sex and often both at the same time. But a coming-of-age cannibalism movie is really nothing compared to Titane. This is as extreme and uncompromising as filmmaking gets. But it never becomes overwhelming bleak. It's a gross nightmare about a bad person who does bad things to people, yet it's a hilarious fish out of water comedy? Uh, sure.

I would not recommend Titane to anybody who cannot stand David Cronenberg at his nastiest. I wouldn’t recommend it anybody who can’t handle female bodies and feminine issues. I wouldn’t recommend it children, grandparents, or adults. This movie is a Sickos-Only convention. You’re either out there, playing around with your Lament Configuration to summon Pinhead to bring you the most intense of film experiences, or somebody has dragged you along to see this just to see the look on your face. 

Because holy shit. Holy fucking shit. The things that go in this movie.

Right now, a warning: SPOILERS. When I publish this, Titane probably will still be in theaters and discussions will still be percolating as to what this movie is. If you’re at all interested in a movie about a lady fucking a car and the consequences of that act, go see it now. If you're not in the New York area, you can rent it on anything. But if anything I've said sounds unspeakable horrible to you and you don’t want that shit in your life, I’ll shake your hand and send you on your way. Your life can continue unaltered and unmutated by everything that follows. For everybody else, let’s get going.

Titane is a movie about Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a kind of dancer/stripper who works auto-shows, gyrating her body over a car’s hood. This is not the car sex, don’t be fooled, even if Ducournau puts a lot of work into capturing every spasm of her titillating gyrations. Alexia as a kid was in a terrible accident that smashed her skull open, leaving her with a huge spiral-shaped scar over her ear, which she reveals openly with pride. Only moments later, Titane is already off the chart in in extremity. Alexia gets her hair stuck in the nipple piercing of a coworker (Garance Marillier), and murders an adoring stalker fan with a hairpin stabbed into his ear. Then while showering, Alexia hears a banging at the door. It’s a big Cadillac with flame-decals, and she fucks the thing.

No, I still don’t understand the exact mechanism of penetration at play here. No, I am not sure what is real and what is fantasy. I can tell you that after this Alexia is pregnant. Yeah, she fucked a Cadillac and has a half-human half-titanium baby growing inside her. And Alexia is not done murdering yet, not by a long-shot.

What follows with Titane is ninety minutes of increasingly deranged and deplorable acts. There’s an attempted abortion. There’s a hilarious killing spree that goes increasingly wrong (Alexia would not be very good at Hitman). People are burned alive. Then, Alexia shaves her hair, breaks her nose, and pretends to be the long-lost son of a fireman captain, Vincent (Vincent Lindon). Against increasingly damning evidence that this “Adrien” is really a psycho-killer with a rapidly-growing pregnancy who is leaking motor oil as breast milk, Vincent refuses to believe they are anything other than father and son. He has also has a serious addiction to steroids.

But it's oddly sweet. It is disgusted and depraved on every standard of good taste. I spent a good portion of Titane covering my eyes, unable to watch the events unfolding. There are limits I can go to, and this is well beyond them. And yet, even in the face of absurdity of the lie, Vincent and Alexia/Adrien are together, in an unstable genderbending near-incestuous family. They have a sweet moment resuscitating near-dead people to the beat of the Macarena. Nobody else can believe their bond either, but it is real.

There’s certainly no lack of ideas in Titane. It is a movie that dares tackle male-gaze objectification with the un-sexy gruesome realities of female anatomy. That hair scene is a kind of statement of purpose - this is the oozing, bleeding physical reality that makes up the heterosexual fantasy. But it is also a slasher movie at times. It's a pondering metaphor about modernity devouring humanity in the union of sex and hydraulic-suspension and tuned-motors. Titane is making literal whatever fetishistic desire is at play when we have women in bikinis dancing around masculine-coded machinery.

Titane is often too much even for me. In terms of raw audacity, I'm not sure you can find many movies that go beyond it. This is so deeply fucked in so many ways, and yet it is disturbingly enjoyable. I love this movie. I want to see everything Ducournau does in the future. No matter what hair-brained masochistic idea enters her head, I want to see that on screen.

In conclusion, Fast & Furious franchise, you are so pathetically normy compared to Titane. You sent a car to space? Boring! Have Vin Deisel fuck a car next time if you want to impress me.

As for next time for Spooky Month it’s… well, over. That’s it. Today is November. 

This month we covered thirty-one very different movies that attempted very different kinds of horror. We never repeated a director or franchise. We covered movies from twelve different countries and as many languages. We had a comedy, a musical, an anime, a theater of the absurd, and a couple piles of absolute dogshit. There were some obscure finds, a few movies unfairly dismissed, and some movies that probably need a worse reputation. But I had fun with even the bad ones. I think I did good. Happy Halloween! Go eat candy and get drunk, then let a ghost eat you.

31 Days, 31 Horror Movies Day 30: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train

2020.

Today we cover one of the best movies I’ve seen all year. I’m very excited about this one.

I saw Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train with no knowledge of the Demon Slayer manga by Koyoharu Gotouge or of the Demon Slayer anime, now currently airing its second season. This film takes place right between the show’s seasons, adapting an entire arc of the manga. I walked into the theater knowing I was in the middle of the story. 

But really, how hard could it be to follow? It’s a shonen anime. There are a well-defined set of genre tropes and rules all these stories rely upon. You can clearly recognize who the protagonist is meant to be, who is supporting cast of wacky friends are, and who the villain is. If you grew up on Inuyasha, nothing here can be too stunning. Demon Slayer: The Movie, directed by Haruo Sotozaki, is just really, really great shonen blockbuster. Not groundbreaking,  but genre tropes played to perfection. It is a virtuoso performance by one of the best studios in the business.

Sure, it would help to know the exact details of what and where and how. Really all you need to know is there is a class of warriors in Taisho Era Japan (roughly 1910s) called “Demon Slayers”. Who are the Demon Slayers? Well, what do you think they do?? They slay demons! Demons in this universe are closer to vampires. They have entire hidden cultures based on secretly devouring people, using complex powers and spells. You can be turned into a demon if you're unlucky, like the main protagonist's sister.

Demon Slayer is horror franchise. Things can be very dark here. The siblings at the center of this story had their entire family devoured. There are haunted houses and lost souls and freaky curses. But ultimately, that is all more window dressing for exciting action. This is a story of warrior pride and moral rectitude defeating the wicked. Friendship overcomes evil. The good and honorable get to move faster than the Muggle eye can follow.

Demon Slayer: The Movie is as close as anime gets to a full-on blockbuster. This is a big production with gorgeous animation and fluid action. It is as impressive a cinematic experience as you will find on any screen or any TV today. The movie and series are by Ufotable, who make arguably the prettiest and most lush anime productions today. Their background is in the Fate Stay Night: Heaven's Feel and Garden of Sinners film series, which both feature spectacular fast-passed action scenes and macabre twists. Our movie today might be Ufotable's greatest achievement. Certainly it is not unpopular. Mugen Train is the most successful Japanese anime film of all time. Beyond that, it is the most successful Japanese film of all time, anime or otherwise. It made $500 million at the box office - during Covid.

The entire film takes place on board a steam train rolling forward in the middle of the night. Our core four heroes, Tanjro (Natsuki Hanae), his good Demon sister Nezuko (Akari Kitō), Inosuke (Yoshitsugu Matsuoka), and Zenitsu (Hiro Shimono), meet up with a high-ranking Demon Slayer with fiery red hair and powers named Rengoku (Satoshi Hino). The Demon Slayers believe something evil is lurking on board the train. Their simplest member, Inosuke, believes this is Final Fantasy VI, and he will have to fight the train itself. Instead (at least for now) the train is haunted by Enmu (Daisuke Hirakawa), a very high-ranked super demon with dream powers.

The first act of Demon Slayer: Mugen Train involves Enmu’s clever strategy. His power is to put people asleep. He traps the heroes in a dream before they even realize they're asleep. Enmu has Freddy Kruger-like powers to create dreams, but he cannot kill you in a dream. (Dying in a dream wakes you up, in fact.) He needs a group of malnourished orphans with a drug-like addiction to “good dreams” to actually do the killing. They sneak into the heroes’ dreams and stab their souls. Some of these dreams are pure comedy, like Inosuke imagining his companions as happy animal friends. Some are more emotionally brutal. Nezuko, who is hiding in a box, is missed by Enmu. She's really upset that Tanjiro is asleep and won't give her head pats. Can she save the day?

Tanjiro, in particular, gets sent back to his childhood home, before he was a Demon Slayer. Enmu sends him back to the best dream possible: before his family was murdered. Tanjiro has to face his dead siblings and mother, and somehow fight his way back to reality. Even not seeing the first episodes where this slaughtered occurred you can feel the emotional devastation. Our hero, before he gets to do anything cool in the movie, is sobbing uncontrollably.

It is hard to imagine a Western blockbuster daring to be this nakedly vulnerable. The ending of Mugen Train relies on the highest of melodrama, a tragedy where the entire surviving cast is left in tears. I often find a lot to admire in foreign blockbuster filmmaking, this commitment to full emotion being one of them. There's also a freedom to not just be bitter. Demon Slayer: The Movie is silly at times, and the silliness actually builds the final impact. Rengoku is introduced as this ridiculous character who never blinks and shouts “DELICIOUS!” after every bite. He then becomes this perfect avatar of martial value and honor, the ideal Demon Slayer. And then later, even he is unable to overcome the darkness ahead of us.

There is also horror. What Enmu is doing to the orphans is unspeakable, even Demon Slayer: The Movie is sheepish about facing the implications of that. This is spooky month, I need to get back to that. Enmu is more than just a dream master, his body is fluid and evolving, like something out of From Beyond. His hand has eyes and a mouth, so it move on its own to give commands. Enmu can absorb the entire train and turn it into a tunnel of flesh, sprouting tentacles down to devour people. The nastiness of the body horror is less gruesome since this is animation, There's nothing physical that is mutating and decaying. But I can’t imagine it smells good.

Demon Slayer: The Movie has a bit of a quirk in that it becomes really two movies with two different themes. There’s Tanjiro overcoming his past to accept reality to defeat Enmu. And there is Rengoku’s challenge to battle off an even greater threat while remaining a pure valorous hero. That’s probably a side-effect of this being an adaptation of a manga story arc; it was never imagined as a single cohesive script. Still, I would prefer a movie that has far too much going on versus one that has far too little.

That does mean we end up with two absolutely incredible fight scenes. Just jaw-droppingly awesome scenes of dudes being dudes and swinging swords and calling wild attacks with colorful animation. Ufotable lives for this stuff, and so do I. Anime rules. It also lands the emotional affect nearly perfectly. You want the good guys to win. You want the right and honorable to overcome everything. And sometimes, brutal reality kicks in, even in the midst of this hyper-charged frenetic fantasy. Even your best is not enough.

You can face your fears, stand up to evil, and just lose. That is a kind of a horror in of itself. (And yes, I know that argument is weak as shit, I just really wanted to talk about this kick-ass movie that rips hard.)

For our FINALE we travel to 2021, THE CURRENT YEAR, the year of a boat blocking the Suez Canal for weeks, certified shitbag Joe Manchin blocking for progress for months, and our next and final movie, Titane.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 29: La Llorona

2019.

We are not talking about The Curse of La Llorona, an American film that also released in 2019 about the Latin American folk monster. No, this La Llorona is a Guatemalan movie directed by Jayro Bustamante. There are no connections to the Conjuring Cinematic Universe today. The American movie made $100 million at the box office. The Guatemala La Llorona instead was critically-acclaimed and was very nearly nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards. Sorry, I had to pick the cool obscure movie over the normie jump scare one.

That said, I do think La Llorona might have used a jump scare or two. This is definitely in the camp of arthouse horror, things like Relic or The Babadook. I love these kinds of A24/Neon cool indie movies, do not get me wrong. But they’re all slow-paced and rely entirely on atmosphere until the end. They build tension beautifully, edging you up further and further until great payoffs. But along the way you do kind of hunger for a ghost to pop out and go “boo!”. You can also feel something of a limited budget, since there are a lot of movies like It Comes at Night out there, all taking place in a single claustrophobic house. 

Sometimes your horror diet can be too wholesome, is all I’m saying.

La Llorona has good reason to stay classy though. This is not just about a haunted house in Central America, this is a haunted house with serious political history. The figure of La Llorona, the weeping woman, is kind a boogieman all across the Americas. (I'm White, so she never visited me as a child, I missed out.) La Llorona is a twisted maternal character who wanders wet places, searching for children to drown. But here, she’s an avenging creature of awful justice. This film is reshaping horror mythology like the recent reboot of Candyman.

The Guatemalan Genocide is not something much known about here in the US, which is itself a serious injustice. (Take a moment and look up what we did to that country for bananas in the 1960s in case you are unaware what a nice “big brother” we’ve been to the Guatemalan people.) After the US-backed coup, various military dictatorships for decades took part in a "Silent Genocide" of maybe as many as 200,000 people or even more. The victims, unsurprisingly, were largely the Mayan natives in the countryside.

Guatemala is a diverse country and a very unequal country. Spanish is just one of dozens of languages spoken, but unsurprisingly the urban Spanish-speaking elites hold much of the power (this is probably over-generalizing the situation a bit). La Llorona's backstory focuses on a massacres of villagers speaking the Kaqchikel language. Jayro Bustamante made headlines years earlier shooting a movie entirely in Kaqchikel, Ixcanul. I've seen claims that this was the very first time any movie had been made in that language, which shows how unrepresented these groups are.

In particular, La Llorona recreates the figure of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the Reagan-backed military dictator of Guatemala of the early Eighties, committed genocide in the Civil Wars of the Eighties, and in a weird twist, was later elected president in what appear to be fully democratic elections. (Real life is never so black and white.) In 2013, Montt was convicted of crimes against humanity by a Guatemalan court, before the Supreme Court demanded a retrial. Montt would never get that trial or face justice. He died of old age in 2018. La Llorona has the character of General Monteverde (Julio Diaz) as a naked fictional stand-in for Montt.

La Llorona is set mostly after Monteverde’s sentence is annulled by the Supreme Court, allowing him to return home. Furious protesters have the General and his family locked down under siege in their fancy estate. That leaves the General and his family trapped alone with nothing but their petulant rejection of reality and their many ghosts. The family includes Monteverde's wife Carmen (Margarita Kenéfic), their daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz), whose husband was disappeared by the regime, their granddaughter, Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado), and their loyal Kaqchikel housekeeper, Valeriana (María Telón), who is rumored to be the General’s illegitimate daughter. Joining them is a weeping woman that only the General can hear at night. This causes the entire Mayan staff to flee except Valeriana, because they know what movie they're in. The only replacement maid the family can find is a mysterious and beautiful young woman, Alma (María Mercedes Coroy), who is not what she seems.

There are few traditional scares in La Llorona until the very ending. It’s a very patient, measured film. It is made up of lots of long-takes and slow shots of the house at night. Only rarely does something jump at you, such as Alma's head appearing suddenly on frame. Alma is a fascinating figure, carrying frogs around, and wearing a plain white shift. She’s less a traditional horror villain than again, an icon of mood, as alluring as she is unearthly. The violence and most intense horror are locked away in dreams. Carmen in her nightmares faces karmic justices when she finds herself positioned as one of the mothers murdered by her husband. She is forced to watch as his soldiers drown her children.

Bustamante is not pulling punches at all on the political horror at work here. The ethnic difference between the light-skinned Monteverde family and their Kaqchikel workers is definitely on his mind. General Monteverde’s awfulness is impossible to ignore, even for his family. Carmen begins the movie with stock rants about "communists", before even she is forced to confront reality. Her eyes start to bleed, a symbol of her previous blindness. Nobody can look away when the General nearly murders his wife by accident, thinking a guerilla has snuck into his house. Nobody can look away when the old man creeps on Alma bathing and everybody, even his little granddaughter, catches him with a tent in his pants.

This is a family tearing apart, but also in a way, coming together. The women have each other in the end and can beg forgiveness. The universe of this film has no mercy for the General, who deserves none. The final scene shows us the universe is not done with this one villain either, it has a hit-list of untouchable old men that will not go unpunished. A boogiewoman is coming for all of them.

And that's really the fantasy at play here. Horror can be a vehicle for desires you can never speak otherwise. Sometimes that fantasy is reprehensible, like how Eighties slashers seem to truly despise sexually-active women. Sometimes that fantasy is empowering like yesterday's movie, Revenge or the class warfare of Ready or Not. In La Llorona's case, it is another violent desire. You cannot say "somebody should just destroy the lives of war criminals" without looking like a maniac, but you can play it out with a ghost story. When there is such a lack of real justice in the real world, at least we can at least find some in horror.

Next time we travel to 2020, the year of 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020… *stares bleakly into the distance, shaking slightly*... and more 2020, and our next movie, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 28: Revenge

2018.

Revenge, directed by Coralie Fargeat, might be our nastiest movie yet. It has the single grossest and most intense moment of any movie we’ve covered so far. Revenge is a French rape-revenge movie, so be warned right now: this is not a movie for anybody who cannot handle sexual violence. It is also not a movie for you if you’re not down for extreme gore. Do not take your Grandma to this one.

That said, Revenge is a thrilling great time. Have I gone full sicko on you all? This rapesploitation movie is fun to me? Well, this isn't a dour movie. Revenge has a lurid color pallet. It heavily sexualizes both its male and female characters – lots of ass close-ups. It employs big, unsubtle symbolism. A Granny Smith Apple turns rotten overnight. Drops of blood raining down on the sand drown ants. By the end, its heroine has become a comic book hero, with her own cool costume and badass swagger. She cuts a killer profile on the page. Revenge is a movie with grit and guts (guts hanging out, in fact), but is not too committed to realism. This is fantasy action.

Let us be clear though, Revenge is not downplaying the utter awfulness of its premise. This is a movie with a moment of sexual violence that is not at all enjoyable to watch. It wants you disgusted by that act and to know that pain. Then it wants you to take that pain and go on a thrill ride of vengeance and catharsis.

We have four principal characters in the cast, all on vacation in a fancy glass chateau on the edge of the desert. They're out just far enough that nobody can hear them scream. Our heroine is Jen (Matilda Lutz), the young trophy girlfriend to a handsome and sinister married businessman, Richard (Kevin Janssens). Jen and Richard’s weekend of luxury and sex is interrupted by Richard’s two schlubby hunting buddies, Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) arriving early. Jen still puts on a good show entertaining them. That is until the morning, when Stan decides he wants more than polite flirting and he’s going to take it, no matter what Jen says. From there, the weekend devolves into a bloodbath. They're slipping on blood-soaked floors by the end.

Faced with Stan’s awful crime, neither other man does the right thing. Dimitri walks away, turns the TV up louder, to pretend nothing is happening. Richard offers Jen a crooked job as compensation, but she must keep her mouth shut. When Jen will not take the deal, Richard throws her off a cliff. She gets impaled through the side on a petrified corpse of a tree, and left for dead. The grim realist version of this story would probably have ended with Jen taking the job, having trouble sleeping, and taking medication for anxiety. The EC comics horror version of this story instead has Jen coming back to life, her zombie exacting supernatural justice.

Revenge hews a bit closer to the latter. There is no blue-skinned zombie Jen, shambling along, carrying the heads of those who wronged her. But Jen does in a way return from the dead. With the help of some Chekov’s peyote to dull the pain, she is able to pull out the branch in her stomach. She then cauterizes the wound using gunpowder and a Mexican beer can, permanently tattooing her belly with an eagle design. That kind of sick biker iconography combined with her red costume star earrings, booty shorts, and of course, a huge rifle, turns Jen into an action star. We're in the realm of psychedelia pulp now, not realism.

The titular revenge is never a simple task. Jen might look the part but she isn’t a superhero, but she is getting better at it with every kill. None of the three men are easy boss fights. They all very nearly get the jump on her. Two probably had her dead to rights but needed to show off and gloat about their masculine prowess… before that prowess is torn right off of them, figuratively. (I’m actually surprised there's no dick gore, considering Revenge has just about everything else.) Richard gets the ultimate humiliation of having to fight entirely naked and gushing blood, his torso held together with plastic wrap.

Revenge saves its nastiest gore for the men. Jen’s revenge upon their bodies is fittingly ironic. Dimitri looked away, so he gets Xs stabbed through his eyes. Richard had Jen impaled, so his stomach is blasted open by a shotgun blast. The worst comes to Stan, the one who raped her. His foot is gashed open in an unforgettably shocking moment. But notably, the gash in his foot is slit-shaped. Jen inflicts a bleeding yonic wound, forcing Stan to violate himself with his own filthy fingers.

I need a drink after describing that scene. Oof. Better hope your mom doesn't walk in on you when that scene plays, that's a long conversation to have.

But you know what? I have no qualms loving Revenge. This is a super stylish fantasy. Revenge is taking the patriarchy and tearing off its head and then drinking its blood, then puking the blood back down the bloody stump of its neck. Revenge spits on the grave of the male gaze. It is gleefully swimming in nastiness for empowerment. This movie loves the nasty. Coralie Fargeat stages dream sequences for no reason other than to construct an awesome head explosion gore gag. It's just fun.

Next time we travel to 2019, the year of going on a hike with a baby in Death Stranding, taking my horse down the Old Town Road, and our next movie, La Llorona. (The Guatemalan one.)