Tuesday

 

One Way

SPOILERS

One Way is kind of a tamed-down, higher-budget version of the classic exploitation film I Spit on Your Grave, following the standard formula of "girl gets raped, get gets brutal revenge." This is the second such film I've seen in the past two weeks, following Straightheads, a British film in which Gillian Anderson goes through the rape/revenge cycle. This time the victim is played by Lauren Lee Smith, who plays a sweet, naive girl who works at an ad agency.

The film begins with a flashback - or perhaps an imaginary flashback. The relationship of the flashback to reality is never established. Lauren Lee is a barely pubescent child who is raped by four young thugs, and is then revenged by an African-American in a general's uniform, who slaughters all the thugs with an assault weapon. It's clear that the general is some kind of an imaginary steam valve for her internal pressure. The rest of the incident? Who knows? Was she raped? Unclear. It comes out later in the film that she reported the rape, including the part about the black general with an AK-47, thus earning herself a nice long rest in a nice soft room since neither the rapists noir their bullet-strewn bodies were ever found. Perhaps she killed them and blamed it on the "general." Perhaps the rape never happened in the first place. Perhaps it happened and she just fantasized the revenge.

In the film's main story, the rape victim is really not the central character, but a peripheral element. She is the platonic best friend of a go-getter in an advertising firm who is just about to marry the boss's daughter. The boss's son catches the rape victim alone at night in the office and violates her brutally, then leans on his future brother-in-law to give him an alibi. Torn between loyalty to his best friend (the victim) and his entire future, he makes the amoral choice and lies on the witness stand.

The victim goes nuts because this is the second time she's been raped without getting any justice from the legal system. She wants revenge. First she schemes to cause the liar to lose his job and his fiancée. Then she kidnaps her assailant, sodomizes him with a gigantic strap-on, then kills him and lets the liar take the fall for the murder. The film is about how all that eventually gets sorted out.

It is not as sensationalistic as I've made it sound. Both the liar and the victim are fleshed-out characters who bring more to the drama than just cardboard plot devices, and there are plenty of twists and surprises at the trial. The film is also assembled with a nice smooth linear narrative and some sound cinematography. It's a completely competent effort in every way.

Having said that, I still can't recommend the film to you. It is much too plot-heavy, and the plot relies on several implausible points.

(1) The police do not believe at first that the liar is the murderer. They naturally make the correct assumption that the rape victim was after revenge. But as the true murderer is about to be hauled off in cuffs, she receives a completely unexpected and airtight alibi. An elderly nun, Sister Mary Plot Device,  swears that the victim/killer was with her during the entire time-frame when the kidnapping and murder occurred. This nun just felt sorry for the victim and decided to lie for her. Since she's an elderly nun ready to swear to her story on the bible, the police naturally rule out the real murderer as a suspect. This was a flagrant abuse of the normal tolerance an audience will allow for the use of a "deus ex machina" - and it was almost literally a "deus" in this case.

(2) The liar's fiancée, by then an ex-fiancée, conveniently forgets an important piece of evidence that would completely exonerate her ex. Later in the trial, she returns at the 11th hour to say she omitted this key fact. The ol' "I was with him/her all night long" alibi is actually used three times, and each time the police or court officers immediately buy into it 100% and redirect the investigation. In this one case it was true. The other two times it was perjury.

(3) The murderer splatters her former rapist's blood all over her Audi, so that it looks like an abattoir. There is no explanation of how she could have cleaned every trace of this from her automobile.

The contrived plotting is exacerbated by the distance the script maintains between the characters and the audience. Although the characterization has some depth, there is no possibility for empathy with any of the characters.

* The rape victim gets away with her revenge murder, and we see her smiling and happy at the end, riding a cab to the airport to begin a new life elsewhere, to the strains of happy-ass Gilligan music. While we can sympathize with her actions to some degree, even root for her revenge, we can't relate to the cavalier, self-satisfied, even smug way in which she laughs at the law. The film would have been better off to allow her a mixture of relief and intense regret.

* The other main character is the liar, and although he seems like a decent human being who grows as the film progresses, we can't really empathize with him because we have seen how he cheats on his trusting fiancée and we have seen how he lies to protect a man he knows to be a rapist.

Overall it's too sensational to be a mainstream drama and too tame to be an exploitation picture. The combination of unsympathetic main characters and convoluted plot machinations lowers the film from the status of drama to melodrama and makes it nothing more than a reasonably engaging story which places a slightly excessive strain on our credulity and offers insufficient compensation in the form of either edification or guilty pleasures.


A note on Til Schweiger, who is the star of this film. I know that he is a superstar in German-language films, especially comedies, and I think he did a good job in a complex role in this film, but I can't imagine that he will ever be a leading man in English-language films. (Unless he produces them himself, as he did with this one.) It's not that he has a German accent. Not at all. If you did not know it in advance, you'd never guess his pronunciation to be Germanic, and the way he speaks English is generally quite charming, but he has a much worse problem than an accent. He has a high-pitched nasal voice and a complete inability to pronounce the English letter "r." At one point he actually said (I'm not exaggerating), "I'm sewious, I'm getting mawwied." I think I may have giggled cruelly at that point. He's a very handsome fellow and a good actor, but unless he gets himself a voice and diction coach, the pinnacle of his English-language career is going to be as the future voice of Elmer Fudd.

(Wagnerian music):

"Be vewy quiet. I'm sewius about hunting wabbits befow I get mawwied."

 

Rise

I've covered this before (and will cover it again). These new caps are from a DVD screener of the unrated version. From what I've seen so far, I'm disappointed with the expanded version. First of all, the narrative technique is more complicated than in the short version, and needlessly so in my opinion. Second, there is actually slightly less nudity from Lucy Liu in one scene - the one where she's talking on her cell phone.

To make up for that, there are two compensatory elements:

1. The Cameron Richardson nude scene is slightly longer and includes a new shot of her bum not seen in the shorter version.

2. The three way sex scene, which includes some girl-on-girl action with Carla Gugino and Lucy Liu is shown in brief detail. (In the short version it was just a couple of frames shown in flashback.) There's no additional nudity in this scene. Still the same shot of Lucy Liu in the bright red lighting.

The only new frame shown below is the third one of Richardson. Some of the others are a little bigger and brighter than before. I'll work on this a bit more when I get the commercial Region 1 DVD in the mail.

Cameron Richardson
Lucy Liu

 

* Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe).

* White asterisk: expanded format.

* Blue asterisk: not mine.

No asterisk: it probably sucks.

OTHER CRAP:

Catch the deluxe version of Other Crap in real time, with all the bells and whistles, here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Malabimba

 (1979)

Malabimba: The Malicious Whore is being released today by Severin, and this will mark the first time the XXX version has been available in the US. Regrettably, the uncensored version of the film earns its XXX rating from hard-core stock footage inserted from porn spools, and does not feature any of the cast.

The setting is a remote castle, and the film opens with a seance. Some presence shows up and raises havoc. After the seance, 16 year old Bimba (Katell Laennec, who never acted again). starts talking like a middle aged woman, and starts doing and saying very unladylike things. The household is not any too stable anyway. Bimba's mother is dead (and was likely the spirit in the seance). Her father is still grieving, and is also worried about being broke and possibly losing the castle. His own mother has the perfect solution. Since his brother has all the money, has been a vegetable for six years, and his brother's wife will inherit everything, she suggests that her son seduce his sister-in-law. Sis-in-law is not opposed to the idea at all.

Spoilers

Bimba starts calling everyone dirty whores, and takes to masturbating and watching the adults for inspiration. When she sees auntie and daddy doing the nasty, she decides to give uncle vegetable the blow job of death. A good nun, who had been caring for the living salad, is thus free to dedicate herself to Bimba's soul. That doesn't really work out for her. Bimba has the last laugh by seducing the nun, passing on the demon that possessed her, and living happily ever after.

End Spoilers

Those hoping for a Giallo or straight horror will be disappointed, but fans of Eurosleaze will find this at the top of the heap in vintage transgressive entertainment.

The DVD is is in Italian with optional English subtitles and is up to the high standards we have come to expect from Severin. In addition to an excellent transfer, it includes:

  • deleted scenes which you can either watch in-line or separately.
  • a recent interview with Mariangela Giordano and DP Franco Villa.
  • a trailer.

IMDb readers say 5.3, but it is hard to say exactly what they are voting on. Many of the comments and reviews have factual mistakes about the plot line and relationships, leading me to believe that not all previous releases have been easy to follow.

 

Katell Laennec

 

Mariangela Giordano

 

Patrizia Webley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Dirty Deeds

Teen comedy. Not as much nudity as you might like, but it will have to suffice.

 

Ariel Kebbel looks sexy in her new bra.

Christie D'Amore looks great topless on whole wheat bread.

Laurie Fetter: no nudity, but looking hot as a whip-wielding dominatrix.

Lots of boobies from two unknowns as they pose for a dude with a camera.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes and collages

"Charmed"

Holly Marie Combs and Shannen Doherty, Season 2, Episode 13

Combs

Doherty

 

 

 

 

 

 

Minotaur

In the ancient land of Minos, a small village of shepherds and farmers live under the cruel reign of Deucalion, a tyrannical ruler who, every five years, sends his soldiers into the village to take eight teenagers and throw them into the Labyrinth to be sacrificed to his god, the Minotaur.

Under an agreement between Deucalion and Cyrnan, the village leader, his son, Theo, would not be taken captive, for he would be the one to lead the village in the future. However when Theo finds out that his love, taken years earlier, is still alive, he swaps places with one of the captives. Thrown into the Labyrinth with the others, Theo must find a way to escape before the Minotaur kills them.

Note: Viggo Mortensen indeed speaks very good Spanish, and he used an accent from Spain for Alatriste. It's pretty good, but you can still tell is an foreigner talking in Spanish.
 

Michelle van der Water

 

Shiva Gholamianzadeh

 

 

 

 

 

HUGO

The Michelangelo of Photoshop is back with his latest collection

Mrs Ringo (Barbara Bach) in Ecco Noi Per Esempio

Milla in .45

Penelope Cruz in Don't Move

Kylie Monogue in The Delinquents

Amber Valletta in The Last Time

Tara Summers in Factory Girl

Sienna Miller in Factory Girl

This is incredible. Tell Me You Love Me seems to have pulled out all the stops and is going for either unsimulated sex or the most realistic simulation possible. Here's Sonya Walger in Episode Three.
A film clip of Katerina Novotna in Running Scared
A film clip of Jung Suh in The Green Chair (sample right)

Some of the chicks of Knocked Up

Stormy Daniels and Nautica Thorn (film clip) Emersen Riley (film clip)

 

The Comedy Wire

Comments in yellow...

Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University, despite thousands of protesters and even president Lee Bollinger, who defended his appearance, introducing him as a "petty and cruel dictator."  Ahmadinejad declared, "We love all nations.  We are friends with the Jewish people."  He defended Holocaust deniers as researchers with a different viewpoint, questioned "who truly was involved" in planning 9/11, claimed Iran had no interest in building nuclear bombs, and denied that gays are executed in Iran.  He said, "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country...In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon.  I don't know who's told you that we have this."

*  He's probably right, there are no homosexuals living in Iran ... any more. 

*  It was an hour's worth of insane, anti-American babbling...or as Columbia students call that, "Sociology class." 

Monday in London, Tim Brady was convicted of being the fastest speeder in British history.  Brady worked for a luxury car rental company, and he'd begged his boss all day to let him drive the new Porsche 911 Turbo.  The boss said no, but he came early in the next day and took it out anyway.  Police clocked him at 172 mph, breaking the previous speeding record of 156 mph.  He was fired, jailed for 10 weeks and banned from driving for three years.   

*  But it was worth it!

*  172 is the speeding record for Britain...In Germany, that's called "first gear." 


Convicted child molester Charles Jay Wolff is suing the New Hampshire prison system for $10 million for serving him hard-boiled eggs.  He says he's an Orthodox Jew and should get food that meets his spiritual needs.  To make the point, he put a hard-boiled egg in the papers he mailed to Federal Judge James Muirhead.  Muirhead responded in Dr. Seuss style, writing, "I do not like eggs in the file. I do not like them in any style. I will not take them fried or boiled. I will not take them poached or broiled. I will not take them soft or scrambled, despite an argument well-rambled.  No fan I am, of the egg at hand.  Destroy that egg! Today! Today!...Today, I say! Without delay!"  A prison spokesman said if Wolff doesn't like eggs, "don't eat them."  

*  If he wants special, religiously-sensitive meals, send him to Gitmo. 

*  Eggs don't meet his spiritual needs...Child molesting does.