Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1974)
Before I get to the film itself I have to say a few words about Quentin Tarantino. Some people question his contribution to the art of film saying he just recycles old ideas and mixes them with his trademark "trendy" dialog. This minority is partly right but I don't agree with them. I love his movies and what he has done to the art of film making, not just by his own films but the awareness he raises for old forgotten "classics". You may think what ever you want about the whole "grindhouse" genre, but it has it's place and deserves to be available for those who wish to see them. It's thanks to him we finally in 2004 got a proper DVD release of this movie. Before that a crappy severely cut bootleg copy was the best you could wish for. For a bit of background, Bo Arne Vibenius got frustrated from the box office failure of his first movie, so he decided to make the most commercial movie he could think of just to cash in some big bucks. Sex and violence was his recipe. Some commercial movie he surely did, the movie got banned straight away in Sweden, it's homeland, only to have the same fate in another country after the other. He finally found a distributor for the movie in America, but only after it had been cut more than 20 minutes. The movie kind of vanished after that even though it was quite famous in the genre scene where it was hyped beyond reality just before it's full length DVD release in 2004. So I of course rushed to spend my last euros on the overly priced "limited edition" they put out with a fear of getting some overly hyped mediocre film. Well I wasn't disapointed, it hit me like a sledgehammer and went straight to my all time favourite movies. Would have paid a lot more had I known what I was really getting. But that was back then 6 years ago, now I gave this classic a revisit. So the movie is a quite basic story of abuse and revenge, but done with a take no prisoners attitude. A girl gets sexually abused as a child and looses her ability to speak. Then 15 years later she's kidnapped and shot up daily dosage of heroin to make her a sex slave. And of course she then takes a revenge. The hard core porn inserts are still one of the best I've seen in these types of movies. Sure they are there purely for the exploitation factor, but yet they kind of fit the story. The other infamous insert with the eye is still freaking gross, but that also fits surprisingly well to the grim tale. The slow motion scenes worked like a charm before, but now not that much, seemed to drag it on a bit too much. The ending was still as magnificent as before, hadn't lost a bit of it's poetic justice feel. All in all it still worked, but now I paid a bit too much attention to the small details which were not really working. As it's a movie with only grander scale events, the details are not meant to be seen, so that kind of broke it up with me. Even though the movie is in The List, I'm not going to give it full percentage now, as right now it didn't work as good as in the first viewing. But also I'm not going to remove it from the list either as it has it's well deserved place there as a definite genre classic.
89%
2 comments:
Never liked taratino, and never probably will, he sometimes shines (Pulp Fiction, Inglorious Bastards) but the rest is just the same piece of crap sarved to people who like to think of themselfs as 'trendy' ;)
Funny thing is that when something becomes popular, it becomes trendy. Where his influences came were quite far from trendy before he made them popular. Now for me that doesn't lower my appreciation towards the movies in any way, I loved the movies he's getting his influences even before I knew who he was and I also like his take on them. Like for example this movie, I really doubt anyone would call it trendy, even though Tarantino loves it and it influenced the Elle Driver character in Kill Bill. Also even though he has become a big name and by that trendy as well, there still are surprisingly few directors following his footsteps, which is usually quite common for all things trendy. I can think of only his buddies Robert Rodriquez and Eli Roth, with maybe some others who haven't made anything as notable as those two. Though I'm also sure there will be many more to come.
Jackie Brown is for me his best movie, followed by Reservoir Dogs. Loved Pulp Fiction when it came out, but it has since lost a bit of it's touch, so it doesn't stand time as well as some of the others.
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