Sign In. Excision Hide Spoilers. Not a typical horror or gore movie.

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Emma Bargetto
Women are powerful—so powerful that it can be hard to keep up with what they are doing, what their bodies are doing, and what they are doing for each other. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
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By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon! We need explosions periodically. Big ones. Preferably accompanied by catchphrases and squealing electric guitars. With crucial contributions from Hong Kong and France, the genre has a global richness that sneaks up on you like a swarthy henchman with a knife clenched between his teeth. Critics and experts have weighed in, too. The killer scene: Ripley straps into a Power Loader suit to destroy the alien queen.
Magazine article Artforum International. Whether Pahns' paroxysm of violation and death signals that Dumont is borrowing the codes of Hollywood horror films to further his exploration of body and landscape or whether it merely marks a natural intensification of the raw, dauntless corporeality of his previous films, it nevertheless elicits an unintentional anxiety: that Dumont, once imperiously impervious to fashion, has succumbed to the growing vogue for shock tactics in French cinema over the past decade. The critic truffle-snuffing for trends might call it the New French Extremity, this recent tendency to the willfully transgressive by directors like Francois Ozon, Gaspar Noe, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux--and now, alas, Dumont. Bava as much as Bataille, Salo no less than Sade seem the determinants of a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement. Images and subjects once the provenance of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn--gang rapes, bashings and slashings and blindings, hard-ons and vulvas, cannibalism, sadomasochism and incest, fucking and fisting, sluices of cum and gore--proliferate in the high-art environs of a national cinema whose provocations have historically been formal, political, or philosophical Godard, Clouzot, Debord or, at their most immoderate Franju, Bunuel, Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Zulawski , at least assimilable as emanations of an artistic movement Surrealism mostly. Does a kind of irredentist spirit of incitement and confrontation, reviving the hallowed Gallic traditions of the film maudit, of epater les bourgeois and amour fou, account for the shock tactics employed in recent French cinema? Or do they bespeak a cultural crisis, forcing French filmmakers to respond to the death of the ineluctable French identity, language, ideology, aesthetic forms with desperate measures? An outrider of French extremity, Ozon's first feature, the suspense thriller See the Sea , alternates oblique terror with shock shots--of a toothbrush dipped in a shit-filled toilet or the subliminal suggestion of a sutured vagina. Ozon defended it and the outre nature of his Criminal Lovers , a cross between Natural Born Killers and "Hansel and Gretel," steeped in sexual pathology and cannibalism, this way: "What I am interested in is violence and sex, because there is a real challenge in rendering the strong and powerful, as opposed to the weak and trivial.