One thing to be aware of when watching any of Ken Russell’s films is that you will spend at least three quarters of the running time saying to yourself, ‘What THE HELL am I watching.’

Mr Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm (1988) is so bizarre that… well, let’s just take a look at the notes I made the last time I watched it:

‘How do you spot a snake vampire cultist lady? She’ll be playing snakes and ladders. In thigh high boots.’

‘Gratuitous historically inaccurate nun torture.’

‘Where IS Peter Capaldi keeping that mongoose?’

Very loosely based on Bram Stoker’s original story, the film takes an olde worlde horror setup and adds a fantastic lady monster (Lady Sylvia Marsh, as played by Amanda Donohoe – a saucy aristocratic predator who thinks white three corner hats are casual wear) and a high pile of hallucinatory WTF.

(Unfortunately, Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm is not a great read. It’s got potential – Lovecraftian horrors stirring beneath the English countryside – but it’s clunky as hell. And contains so much sexism and racism that it reads like an unsubtle parody of a Victorian horror tale.)

Peter Capaldi plays Angus, an archaeology student who finds the skull of some kind of monster in the garden of a B&B in Derbyshire. The B&B is run by two sisters – Eve and Mary (Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis. Note the unsubtle choice of names) whose mother has disappeared in mysterious circumstances.

Then Lord D’Ampton (Hugh Grant) invites them to his ancestral hall for an 80s folk/rock party, where he re-enacts the legendary tale of an ancestor of his, who killed a giant worm (guess what colour it was.) that was terrorising the village some centuries previously.

(The beast that his ancestor had the squabble with was the D’Ampton Worm. As in the Lambton Worm. Both Stoker’s and Russell’s version of ‘White Worm’ take place in Derbyshire and not Durham. There were a lot of worm monsters about in the olden days, apparently.)

This gets Angus wondering – could his new-found skull have something to do with the one in the tale? Lord D’Ampton is foppishly sceptical. And then Lady Sylvia slinks into view. And spits venom on a crucifix. I haven’t seen Downton Abbey for ages, but I’m pretty sure that her TV namesake is not in the habit of doing such things.

What follows is an unsettling campfest. Lady Sylvia does some horrible things (that poor boy scout) but she’s also horribly fascinating. I don’t know if she was meant to be a satire on the ‘sexy sex ladies who are EVIIILL’ trope or an unsubtle parody of 80s decadence (see Kate Beaton’s marvellous Dracula cartoon for a nice pisstake of how this trope came up in Stoker’s most famous tale). But either way Ms Donohue looks to be really enjoying herself.

Eve and Mary are sketchily drawn characters – it transpires that Eve is a virgin, which makes her sacrifice fodder for the great big worm beast living under Sylvia’s mansion (paging Doctor Freud). Lord D’Ampton has some rude dreams and tries to fix things with his super posh man skillz. Eventually, Angus has to face vamped up Sylvia alone. Yep, Peter Capaldi is the Final Girl.

He does a bit of snake charming with a kilt and a set of bagpipes. And a mongoose. If anyone’s concerned that Doctor Who-loving kids might come across Malcolm Tucker’s epic swears by accident online, wait until they get a load of this.

Lair of the White Worm is basically awesome trash. Or it’s trash cinema French kissing arthouse cinema down a dingy alleyway. And sometimes that’s what you want.

• Emily McQuade lives in North London. She enjoys finding weird old films on YouTube and watching other weird old films at the BFI. When not thinking about films, she enjoys books, gigs and making up elaborate conspiracy theories involving squirrels. She can also be found on Twitter: @missmcq.

The nights have drawn in, there’s a chill in the air and it’s that time of year where I like to do what I, admittedly, like to do pretty much the rest of the year: gather the family around a nice cosy horror film and scare the bejeezus out of ourselves.

I’m especially fortunate, living in Brighton, that there’s a thriving scene of horror fanatics, including the founders of the Classic Horror Campaign, whose raison d’etre is to bring back British horror to our TV screens and who run a brilliant occasional horror film festival called Frighten Brighton.

Last year they ran a day of screenings that traversed the decades from the Thirties to the Seventies. It was fascinating to watch an intricate snapshot of women in horror unfolding before me, reflective of Hollywood’s complex relationship with sexuality, equality, objectification and empowerment.

In just the five films screened – Mad Love, The Cat People, Them, Plague of the Zombies and Phantasm – a gamut of femininity was presented, from virginal innocent to sexual seductress, strident powerful woman to flailing damsel in distress, repressed lesbian to swooning romantic.

In almost all these films there is a notable slide towards objectification; the woman’s body as a object of desire for the monster or mad scientist, the virginal sacrificial lamb, or the slutty cannon fodder helpless to avert her fate. This is reflective of the wider problems within a genre that still churns out women’s bodies to be fondled, fucked, kidnapped and sliced up.

The brilliant, feminist-principled Women in Horror Recognition Month campaign¹ recognises this difficult relationship with horror. Their campaign illustrates that it can be one of the most objectifying genres, but is also an important genre for exploring a vast array of issues – power, psyche, politics, social constructs, war, violence, gender – and therefore that it’s important that women’s roles are recognised and supported.

They provide a platform for women directors, writers, actors and aficionados to get their work seen and to address issues within the industry, as well as misogyny in the genre. They’ve also used social media, blogging and film festivals to explore what horror has to contribute to the female narrative.

It’s a massive area to dig into. There’s been a swathe of material written about women as survivors in horror films – they occupy a myriad of roles: the Final Girl, the matriarch (all hail Ellen Ripley!), the victim who finds her nerve and the avenging angel survivor – frequently a victim of sexual violence.

It’s a rich seam to explore, and there’s a whole other vein to mine exploring the ones who live and the ones who die in horror movies, and what this represents metaphorically, culturally and politically. Equally, there’s a huge area to address when it comes to representations of race in horror – for example, why the last one to live is often a white woman (think Night of the Living Dead). But what about when women themselves are the stuff of nightmares?

Women aren’t always the victims in horror, and whilst there have been significant problems in the history of the genre, it has also been willing to explore areas of female experience that other genres just weren’t ready for, often at times when it would have been deeply contentious to make a film that discussed, say, sexuality or sexual violence, let alone the fact that you’d still be hard pushed to find a film about what a nightmare getting your period can be! There are numerous examples of fantastic writing and performances in horror that explore the feminine diabolique whilst also touching on real world issues underneath.

1936’s Dracula’s Daughter is a fine example of how horror can reflect both the cultural perception of women and the abiding social currents, as well as exploring key issues for women through the figure of a female monster. It was produced as part of the Universal stable of horror films, following directly on the heels of Tod Browning’s Dracula.

Gloria Holden plays the troubled and lonely Countess Zaleska, desperate to cure herself of vampirism. She tries both the occult and psychiatry before giving in to her bloodlust. The film is a Gothic delight, and Holden is dark and intense, quietly terrifying and tragic at the same time.

The film barely contains its sapphic undertones. Zaleska lingers over her female victims, covets their bodies and beauty, and prowls the streets at night in search of blood. The countess is very much a creature of her time in cinematic history, reflecting both the notion that homosexuality was considered a psychiatric malaise, and the censorship movements of the 1930s, with the Hays Code being introduced just a few years before. This was the first regulation code for cinema, reflecting religious and conservative views that any deviant behaviour had to be hidden, including sexual acts, prostitution, white slavery and homosexuality. The film is also a shining example of the demonisation of homosexuality, the portrayal of lesbians as predatory and dangerous and this is reflected in the scene where Zaleska attacks a young model, Lili.

1942’s Cat People likewise has a female monster at its heart. Irena moves to New York from Serbia, falling in love with the charming Oliver and marrying him. Underneath the surface, however, is the secret that she is descended from a wild people who can turn themselves into cats. Irena seems convinced that if she gives in to her passions she will lose control and turn into a cat herself – and her marriage becomes strained by a lack of intimacy.

Again, there is subtext around psychology, sexual repression and the power in a woman unleashing her sexuality. There is also a queer subtext as Irena stalks her husband’s mistress, Alice, and her inner cat is unleashed, suggesting that the repression she felt was her sexuality rather than her lack of ardour for her husband. All this is neatly tucked away from the heavy-handed censors, but easily readable.

Horror provided a way to express and explore female sexuality as complex and powerful – although again, it’s a sign of the times that it was also dangerous and deadly. Both films provided bold representations of female sex and sexuality at a time when it just wouldn’t have been possible to do so in a straightforward feature film. Although the subtext was ultimately tragic and fatal, it was a fair reflection of both the turmoil of coming to terms with being queer and the risk of society’s response if the fact was made public. Horror was the perfect cypher.

Moving forward, horror has continued to provide the perfect medium to explore these themes. The female monster has been a great platform for exploring puberty and all its commensurate delights: it’s all blood, mayhem and rage, after all. Think Carrie at the prom, exploding with fear, confusion and violence at her tormentors, triggered by her menstruation. Think Ginger in Ginger Snaps (2000) – first period, first full moon, morphing to discover her sense of identity, her confidence and her sexual liberation.

Both Carrie and Ginger Snaps are reflective of the fact that we are also still culturally trained to view periods and puberty with a sense of revulsion. There are several key moments in Ginger Snaps where adult characters view menstruation with disgust, implying that the girls should be ashamed of even speaking about it. Our bodies are the centre of the change in puberty, and this is interpreted into a kind of body horror, where the confusion, pain, hormones of puberty are projected outwards.

Carrie acquires powers to impact on the world around her to be able to make herself visible, powerful and a force to be reckoned with for the first time. Ginger starts to pay attention to and receive attention from her peers – she becomes a sexual being as well as a creature of rage. Bianca Nielson’s fascinating article Something’s Wrong, Like More Than You Being Female delves even further into Ginger Snaps’ representation of puberty and is well worth a read.

What is great about the film is the way that Brigitte and Ginger deconstruct their experiences together, sharing their views of their society, their bodies, and of their relationships. It’s notable how isolated Brigitte becomes when she can no longer share Ginger’s experiences. Although these conversations revolve around the fantastical, trying to deal with Ginger’s ‘wolfing out’, they’re also painfully familiar.

The female monster also allows us opportunity to address expectations of the female body. Hammer has a lot to answer for when it comes to heaving bosoms and frail victims in flimsy nighties, but in Countess Dracula (1971) it also addressed ageing. In particular, it addressed the fear of no longer meeting the expectation that women should be beautiful, and the anxiety that to age means to no longer be desirable.

The countess, fearing the loss of her young lovers, takes to bathing in the blood of virgins to retain her youth. Played by horror queen Ingrid Pitt, she was also rooted in the real life Elizabeth Bathory, who was imprisoned for murdering over 80 women and allegedly bathing in their blood. Countess Dracula is a silly, campy horror film, but it also manages to contain moments of poignancy, especially as the countess is forced to face her fate – old, hated and done for. It’s not a cheery message, but it’s a fair reflection of the cultural obsession with youth and beauty.

The girl monster also allows us to explore the idea that what’s outside doesn’t necessarily reflect what’s inside – ideas around appearances that fall outside the norms of society, the idea that ‘the other’ isn’t necessarily horrific, and the idea that monsters, conversely, can come in appealing packages. This is especially powerful when it challenges perceived notions of womanhood and beauty.

In Return of the Living Dead 3, reluctant zombie Julie bodily punishes herself because she’s no longer wholesome and good. She uses pain and piercing to control herself and to make her outside appearance reflect the badness she feels within, self-harming, cutting, modifying and piercing until she loses control. Again, on the surface it’s a silly film, but it’s a powerful scene when we begin to unpick the body as an object of aberration for young women. When Julie modifies herself she appears dangerous and sinister, but ultimately she’s still Julie underneath – she’s still a young woman mortified by herself.

This issue is also brilliantly addressed in last year’s breakthrough horror American Mary. Filmed by twins Jen and Sylvia Soska, and from their point of view explicitly feminist, it deals with the world of extreme body modification – carried out by trainee doctor Mary.

The modified women are deeply challenging representations of femininity and beauty. Their appearances are shocking and extreme, although underneath, they are caring and gentle despite seeming monstrous. This is exemplified by the character Ruby Realdoll, who desires to become sexless and doll-like. Her body has been cut and sliced to become featureless – monstrous to the accepted notion of beauty, but beautiful to her and vital to her self acceptance. The modification has dire consequences and accurately reflects how society rejects the other, often violently.

Mary herself – the ‘normal’ girl – is herself made monstrous, violent and increasingly amoral. In part, this is due to the societal pressures on her, including the fact that surgery is a boys’ club from which she is excluded as a young woman. It is also in part caused by an awful attack carried out by someone who presents themselves as the nice guy – nice job, caring profession, well respected, known to Mary. It’s a very challenging scene, mostly because the directors don’t allow you to look away, and because they refuse to fetishise it to make it more bearable. Horror reflects reality – as the directors themselves said, there are no cutaways in real life.

Importantly, though, Mary is also not a particularly nice person. She looks stunning, but she is not what we expect. She is sharp edged, cold, and self-absorbed; neither a fluffy air-headed beauty nor a bookish high achiever. Horror allows us to subvert some accepted tropes and often spits cultural expectations and stereotypes back in our faces. The fact that American Mary has generated so much discussion about what is and isn’t feminist cinema is fantastic.

Mainstream cinema is still deeply prescriptive about how women can act, talk and be – the girl monster refuses to be chained by these prescriptions. Horror is a brilliant, bloody palate for our real issues, and as a result it’s provided a forum for us to to talk about being a woman in a way that other genres could only dream of.

Of course we should enjoy the thrill of being scared. Of course we should immerse ourselves in the delight of a silly campy horror or a terrifying splatterfest – and no, I’m not suggesting that every horror fest should be an exercise in cinematic analytical criticism. But I love our sinister sisters. They’ve been reclaiming the night for decades.

• Ruth Sullivan is a children’s charity worker by day and avid gamer and consumer of pop culture by night. A former teacher and history nerd, she blogs in a personal capacity at i-conoclastic and is part of the reviews team for Close-Up Film. She tweets as @littlespy.

1. Ed’s Tiny Note: We were ambassadors for the 2013 WiHM campaign, and you can read the blogfest we curated for it here.

One of the most amazing things I saw was, without question, the screening of the Wonder Women! : the Untold Story of American Heroines documentary.

I’d never heard of it before to be honest, which is hardly surprising as it’s an independent release (no screening near you? Organise one – there’s a link at the bottom of this post!). It’s basically a visual look at the intersections of Women Woman iconography and certain aspects of Second Wave American feminism.

Did you know that Wonder Woman was regarded by quite a few feminists as the ‘face’of Second Wave American feminism? Neither did I. Quite frankly, being a Marvel girl rather than DC, I’d always thought of Wonder Woman as one of the more tame, conservative superheroes. Didn’t she spend most of her time being tied up?

Image from Flickr.com user bbaltimore, used under Creative Commons.

I’m now going to recount my new and shiny understanding of Wonder Woman, as gleaned from the documentary through a vague haze of alcohol. Bear with me.

The iconography of Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman, it turns out, is fairly awesome. She was developed during World War II, and was therefore off fighting the Nazis (alongside Captain America? That bit wasn’t very clear) after realising that she had to go off and save America. Because that’s what awesome heroes did. She even had to win some sort of Olympiad before she was able to do it! And then she fought some Nazis, and some criminals, and in the 50s this was deemed to be DREADFUL. So she was rewritten as having given up her powers. During this period she found she wanted to make cakes, and opened a beauty parlour. OF COURSE. Because nothing says ‘superhero’ like CUPCAKES!

Anyway, along came Second Wave feminism, looking for a face for the recently-launched Ms magazine. And there was poor Wonder Woman, an icon in need of reclaiming. Off came the apron and on went on the magic bracelets!

SURELY IT IS TIME FOR THE 70S?

I won’t recount the entire documentary. Suffice to say that when the 1970s and 1980s kicked off, along with them came a whole slew of female heroines, from Cagney and Lacey, Charlie’s Angels and Bionic Woman, straight through to the live-action Wonder Woman herself, Lynda Carter.

Here, have a photo of her being awesome:

Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. Photo from Flicker user shaunwong.

Here are some other 1970s (& 1980s) heroines.

Cagney & Lacey. Image from kaksplus.fi.

Charlie’s Angels, 1977. Image from Wikimedia Commons .

Notice anything?

Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley. Image from sabotagetimes.com.

Ripley vs Van Damme

The 1980s also gave us hyper-masculinity along the lines of Van Damme, Schwarzenegger and Stallone. It also gave us Ellen Ripley and (in 1991 admittedly, therefore just in the 1990s) Sarah Connor. There are a bunch of others. The 1980s were pretty awesome for strong female heroines, which is a sentence I never thought I’d be writing. When I first saw Terminator 2 as a little girl, I didn’t even know that women could do chin-ups!

Grrrl Power dominoes

As well as the iconography of Wonder Woman herself, the documentary looked at the development of Grrrl Power. We are taken through the original use of the term through interviews with Kathleen Hanna, starting back with Riot Grrrl, and its appropriation by the Spice Girls into something commercial.

I’m not going to depress you by taking you through the deaths of all the ‘strong female characters’ on television in 2001. I think those of us in the UK were somewhat sheltered through the impact of that, having our reception of those shows delayed by several weeks or even months. We therefore did not experience their deaths as the American viewers would have: one after the other, falling down like dominoes in 2001.

Back to Wonder Woman…

Like this, only AWESOME.

… and to her fans, ages 2–99. In the documentary, there are interviews with small children and the role Wonder Woman has played in their lives. There are interviews with activists – up to and including Gloria Steinem – and their perspectives on how Wonder Woman influenced Second Wave (and in some case Third Wave) feminism – and vice versa. There are perspectives on women-saving-women and the creation of Wonder Woman Day. There’s even a Wonder-Woman-on-a-string-with-motor, making her fly around and around on a child’s ceiling. How awesome is that? I want one!

Not your grandmother’s feminism

Now let’s talk about what wasn’t there. The film isn’t marketed as a history of Second Wave Feminism, nor even the (entire) history of Wonder Woman. That’s important, because the intersections the film is talking about are intersections with white, heterosexual, cis feminism. It therefore falls down significantly on the feminism movement outside of that pretty narrowly defined range.

It was also a bit dispiriting to not have at least a mention that the original name for Ms. magazine was Sojourner. There is also little mention of the subversion of the Wonder Woman image and iconography outside of radfem activism.

That said, the film doesn’t pretend that it is in any way comprehensive, or representative of all feminism movements. And, as a look at the history of Wonder Woman and how she was reclaimed in the radfem part of Second (and Third) Wave American feminism… well, it’s pretty awesome.

Frankly, it’s worth watching for the interviews with her tiny modern-day fans alone. There is something deeply heartening about hearing a child draw strength from a feminist icon, however corrupted and reinterpreted that image has been over the years.

Not convinced? Have a look at the trailer:

See? Awesome.

• In the highly likely event that there are no screenings near you, you can contact the Outreach Coordinator at Wonder Women to arrange one.

OH, ALSO THERE’S MINOR SPOILERS

I ain’t gonna lie, readers; it took me a while to write this one.  I got home from seeing Pacific Rim, irritated and betrayed (for reasons I’ll explain), and got on The Internet, ready to share my frustrations with the film with a giant swathe of the population that I assumed would doubtless have the same irritations I did.

I found no such people.  In fact, I found a great number of people whose feminism and opinions I respected claiming it this great inclusive/representational victory and lauding the characterisation of the, um, one woman.  My crest fell.  I suddenly felt ashamed and cowed.  Maybe they’re right, I thought.  Maybe Pacific Rim is this Big Thing after all and I’m just this picky little boy who should swallow my face and look grateful.

Or maybe it’s like Avengers Assemble all over again, where everyone and their dog made Joss Whedon into a Maypole and danced around him, singing the praises of his Black Widow and how boss she was, and all I could think was “yeah but she still strangles men with her thighs in a black leather catsuit though doesn’t she”.  It’s a step forward, but even further steps could have been so easy, yet weren’t taken.

Let’s look at Pacific Rim’s director, Guillermo del Toro.  Now, Guillermo is my homeboy.  We go way back.  He’s made some of my favourite films in the world ever, and written some of the best women in filmland, and then put them in main roles (example: Pan’s Labyrinth).

Mako (Rinko Kikuchi) is good in Pacific Rim, sure, but despite what others say about her getting the protagonist’s development arc, she isn’t the protagonist, Boring Raleigh (Charlie Hannam) is, and that’s where the film focuses.  It needn’t have done, as Mako does indeed get a nice narrative arc of her very own – but it really does focus on Raleigh instead.  Why, Guillermo?  Why?

Why focus on the boring guy?  The boring inexplicable guy who is not only tedious, but a TERRIBLE choice for “massive robot pilot saviour of mankind” because he consistently makes awful decisions?  Decisions so awful, in fact, that I thought that maybe his progress through the film would punish him for his reckless endangering of human lives – but then he was eventually lauded for them!  I just. No. (There was a lot wrong with Raleigh, like why doesn’t his hideously traumatic co-death with his brother have more of an effect on him – but I honestly don’t have the wordcount to get into it!)

There were no end of cool background people that would have made the film a) more interesting and b) less inevitably-focussed-on-the-white-American-dudebro.  Loads of internet has spaffed cheerful over the Soviet team (Heather Doerksen and  Robert Maillet) – and they’re right to do so; they’re bossly and cute as hell (and let’s not forget that BLOODY SEXY Brutalist Jaeger design!!) but they get three lines, all of which are techy floundering and then they die.  That’s… that’s not great, guys!  Three lines!  I had more lines when I was an extra at the local Methodist church panto when I was 14!

Mako wasn’t terrible.  There was a standout bit for me where she pilots a Jaeger for the first time and loses it completely as Her Traumatic Past flings nightmare fuel into her face until she endangers the life of everyone else in the Jaeger playhouse – and yet her co-pilot Boring Raleigh somehow manages to swallow down and stamp on the MASSIVE PTSD that presumably he’d have (along with brain damage, surely??) from sharing a brain with his beloved brother as he died an extremely brutal death.  I just.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’d have been less bothered by her shortcomings if she hadn’t been forced to carry the flag as literally the only woman in the film with lines.

“But they didn’t kiss at the end!” people have said, delightedly.  And in a world where films appear to be literally impossible to put on celluloid without The Day Being Saved By Heterosexuality, that’s great.  I’m all for non-sexual relationships.  But that’s not how the film was shot or put together.  If it was, it didn’t do enough to undermine the romantic overtures between Raleigh and Mako all the way through (Del Toro says that he did their fight scene “like a sex scene” even), so while no, they didn’t kiss – they honestly might as well have done, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had done.

Frustratingly, it’s not 100% crap.  I say “frustratingly” because I’d love to just shit all over this thing wholesale and be done with it, but I can’t.  The world of Pacific Rim is absolutely spectacular.  Del Toro has done his worldbuilding trick where he’s made everything in the setting fantasticly beautiful, cruel and bleak.  But then stitched the actual narrative and characterisation out of tropes.  Tropes aren’t a bad thing per se – but I honestly felt that I had seen this film before in a million different cinema-sittings.  When you can predict a character’s story before he (and it’s always a he) has even done it?  Not great.

But the good bits are really good.  The robots are heavy, work-worn and believable.  The Kaiju are so beautiful they made me do facewaters on numerous occasions.  You know when Newt (played by Charlie Day – but I’ll come back to him in a minute) braindives into their world to spy?  That black passing body over the giant red sun?  The fiery skies and the knowledge that Kaiju are their answers to mechs?  The hot, prickly balloon of delight inflated in my chest and I felt this sudden desperation for Del Toro to make the film he’s clearly always wanted to, carry on from Hellboy II‘s overtones of human punishment monster Apocalypse, and give it the “and then everyone died” happy ending that I’ve always wanted to see him do.

“We terraformed it for them,” Newt says breathlessly.  Humans have ruined the world, and now monsters want it to play in.  I wept.  “Yes!” I yelped in the cinema.  “Stamasfodfpohssadjfdk!” I elaborated, which I think in this context meant, “Please give me all the monster Apocalypse porn I need to make my heart complete, Guillermo.”  My boyfriend patted my knee sharply, which I think in this context meant, “Please stop making the sounds that will inevitably get us kicked out of the cinema”.

But it didn’t happen.  I felt personally betrayed.  Come on, Guillermo, I thought we were bros.

Speaking of bros, I did ship/love Newt and Herman (Burn Gorman, who is a hottie), the rivalrous, hilarious, day-saving, vitally-important-to-the-plot-and-yet-still-somehow-endearingly-rubbish scientists.  “You can’t ship them!” cried my lovely housemate.  “Did you see how they fumbled a *handshake*?  That is what the sex would be like.  Flapping, awkward and inaccurate.”  Yes, it would.  Just like regular sex.

Newt was great though.  We follow him through the underground Kaiju-part trade as he shambles off on his quest to find this one particular drug-baron.  Ron Perlman, of course, plays this…

s p e c i f i c   c r i m

and…

…no, I think we’re done here.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• The monster/mech effects are literally the best I’ve ever seen
• The world Del Toro has built is compelling, beautiful and engrossing.  The background detail makes it all feel really real and believable
• Idris Elba Is A Severe Hottie
• Do not underestimate how awe-inspiringly beautiful it is

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• You have seen it before, in a million different hats, over the past twenty years
• The monsters don’t win AGAIN
• It hints at doing something fun and different but doesn’t actually
• What sort of a name is “Stacker Pentecost” anyway¹

1. Ed’s Note: “MY NEW NAME FROM NOW ON”

According to Eli Roth, it was a conscious choice for the first example of nudity in Hostel II (2007) to be that of a man. Following the credit sequence and a quick catch up with Hostel survivor Paxton (Jay Hernandez), we’re introduced to our victims.

Far from the seedy lights of Amsterdam, these beautiful college-age women are in a life drawing class in Rome. Within thirty seconds, the male nude is replaced by a female model, Axelle (Vera Jordanova), who disrobes to the sound of audible gasps. Her gaze lingers on our main character, Beth (Lauren German). Beth grits her teeth, her forehead puckered into a tense frown as she begins to sketch.

“Jeans, no heels,” is what Beth says when asked if she’s packed for their upcoming trip to Prague with friends Whitney and Lorna. Beth may as well be called Sidney or Laurie: she is masculinised, her relationship with the female model Axelle is eroticised (Whitney even jokingly refers to Axelle as Beth’s ‘girlfriend’) and it is revealed that Beth keeps her father on an allowance following the death of her wealthy mother.

Beth and Axelle’s encounters are carefully structured to be titillating, and yet Beth’s sexuality is never openly discussed. Compared to the view of male homosexuality depicted in the first Hostel film, we’re in full-on homophobic fratboy territory here: lesbians are hot (as long as they’re young, slim and not too gay), and gay men are scary and have to be repressed.

Hostel II differs to Hostel in that we get a deeper understanding of how the whole operation works, focalised through two American clients, Todd and Stuart. “This isn’t like going to a whorehouse,” Todd explains to reluctant Stuart after they successfully bid a collective $100,000 on securing Whitney and Beth as their torture victims. “You can’t just back out.”

Roth works hard to ensure the viewer feels an iota of sympathy for Stuart: he is de-masculinised by a practical and demanding wife, he lacks charisma, and he has to be cajoled into the Hostel experience by the powerhouse Todd. Todd compares their first kill to losing their virginity; Stuart pensively asks, “Do you think we’re sick?”

“We’re the normal ones,’ Todd replies, taking a deep sniff of cocaine. As they draw up to the factory, a mournful serenade plays as we see the doubt flicker across Stuart’s face. Roth asks us to feel sympathy for someone who has essentially been peer-pressured into paying vast sums of money to torture a woman – who intentionally resembles his wife, no less – to death.

Hostel twists itself into a game of privilege top trumps. The rich are powerful and the powerful are rich: the notion of power, and an individual’s lack of control over their own fate, presents a contemporary spin on the 18th century fear of the aristocracy, often portrayed through a vampiric allegory along the lines of Dracula.

Hostel II even includes a female client who pays hard cash to writhe – naked, naturally – in an Elizabeth Bathory-esque tub as the blood of virginal Lorna showers down upon her bare skin. It’s interesting to note that this is one of the few onscreen deaths of torture victims: the franchise often shies away from the so-called money shot (another grotesque connection between torture flicks and pornography).

Additionally, the fact that the only female client – aside from a stern silver-haired horsey type who unsuccessfully bids on the trio – chooses to murder her victim in this rather specifically vain method reinforces the assertion that for women, beauty is a matter of life and death. (This is also articulated in Hostel when the infamous “eyeball” woman catches sight of her mutilated face and throws herself from the arms of safety to certain death under a speeding train).

The fate of Whitney is grisly: she is made up ‘for the client’ in a corset and smudged, clownish make up. Todd gets cold feet, and so she is offered around and sold to the highest bidder. Sensitive Stuart finds his sea legs and takes her on as a warm up for Beth, who is dressed in a suit and made to even further resemble his wife.

How does Beth survive? She seduces him, naturally, then chops his dick off and pays her way out because she’s stinkin’ freakin’ rich. Let’s not forget her place, though: after negotiating with the Alan Sugar of the Hostel world, she is bent over a table and tattooed on the small of her back, rather than her bicep, ankle or, oh I don’t know, anywhere on her body that wouldn’t liken the process to being fucked from behind.

In a world in which The Human Centipede exists (and actually manages to generate enough revenue to produce a sequel), the so-called “torture porn” movement seems to have finally tipped over the edge into self-parody. The golden age for splatter flicks was 2002-2007. Since then, things seemed to have waned.

The biggest horror titles of 2012 suggest a rekindled preference for things that go bump in the night, with poltergeists, paranormal happenings and possession pictures enjoying a rise in popularity. The washed-up sequels of classic Splat Pack originals, such as Hostel III and Saw ad infinitum, are slinking off into the background – and good riddance.

• By day, Alice Slater is a writer and bookseller from London. By night, she is a horror film addict who always keeps the lights on. She writes for Mslexia and Drunken Werewolf, and she blogs about veg*n high jinx at SmokinTofu.com.

It’s unsurprising to learn that the big names in the so-called “torture porn” movement are all blokes. Known as the Splat Pack, James Wan (Saw, Dead Silence), Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes), Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel), Greg McLean (Wolf Creek), Rob Zombie (House of 1000 Corpses, Halloween) and Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II-IV) all specialise in a brand of horror that leans heavily on sadism and graphic onscreen gore – the more creative and toe-curlingly disgusting, the better.

Eli Roth met a wave of criticism for the gender roles in Hostel (2005), a film in which all the women are either sex workers, hypersexualised and morally repugnant, strung out on enough narcotics to render them completely obsolete as anything other than onscreen ass, or all of the above (with the exception of two Japanese twentysomething tourists, who are portrayed as giggling and coquettish – the stereotypical western idealisation of Japanese women as schoolgirlish and subservient).

Roth, being a sensitive chap at heart, created Hostel Part II as a response – kind of like Neil Marshall hopping from Dog Soldiers to The Descent. Nice try, Eli. The gender politics are equally terrible in Hostel II. I know – “I can’t believe it!” said absolutely no one.

Now, horror isn’t the most feminist genre, but it’s my genre of choice. Female nudity, themes of female virginity and scenes of a sexual nature are prevalent in horror, from chaste Janet Leigh’s infamous shower scene to the chesticular fireworks of Piranha 3DD. Sex and death – the circle of life, as Sir Elton calls it – are intrinsically linked, and often sit well side by side. We all know what the phrase “torture porn” refers to, but there’s a problematic duality created by suggesting that sadistic violence and sexual gratification are titillating in the same way. It reduces the whole horror genre to something akin to Bizarre magazine: Blood! Tits! Tits covered in blooood!

Hostel opens with an unsympathetic bunch of lads on tour as they weave through the streets of Amsterdam. The group laugh at sensitive, still-getting-over-his-ex Josh (Derek Richardson) for suggesting they take a break from smoking pot and chasing skirt to check out a museum or two. Then they fistbump and hi-five their way through the Red Light District. It leaves us all feeling well primed for the next hour and a half of blood, guts and dismemberment because they are quite possibly the most unlikeable people in the history of humanity (apart from Jeremy Clarkson, who retains his crown of The Worst).

“Paying to go into a room to do whatever you want to someone isn’t exactly a turn-on,” says Sensitive Josh, and we all cock our heads and recognise that he is definitely going to die. The anti-sex work comparison drawn between prostitution and the premise of Hostel – the rich paying high prices to torture and kill others – doesn’t go unnoticed.

Loutish and drunk, the lads are denied entrance to their hostel. As a rain of glass bottles smashes around their feet, an eastern European tourist offers refuge in his hostel room. Here, Sensitive Josh awkwardly explains the definition of ‘clitoris’ (“Women have it? It’s like right near the labia? Like, it hangs?”) and talk naturally turns to sex.

“Looking for girls?” their new friend Alex asks. He then creepily shows them photos of himself having sex with women “so hot, you won’t believe it”. He explains that the women of Bratislava “go crazy for any foreigner. You just… take them.”

After hearing one of the most chilling phrases in the history of patriarchy, off the threesome go to Bratislava. A creep on the train confirms that eastern European women are smokin’ hot and DTF. He then places a hand on Sensitive Josh’s thigh and Josh reacts as though he’s just had his Achilles tendons cut (and we can be accurate here because that is exactly what happens to him approximately twenty minutes later).

This brief moment of casual homophobia is not to be overlooked: Josh, the sensitive one, the most respectful and the least sexually repugnant of the three, later places his hand on this man’s thigh in a sincere yet hesitant apology – moments after being called a “faggot” by Paxton. “I would have done the same thing at your age,” the man says, regarding Josh’s extreme and aggressive reaction to the hand-on-thigh moment from before. “It’s not easy, but from my experience, choosing to have a family was the right choice for me. Now I have my little girl, who means more to me than anything. But you should do what’s right for you.”

Hold on, what? It’s no coincidence that the next shot is of Josh ‘making his choice’ – on the brink of having sex with an incredibly attractive woman. Because of course, sexuality is a choice and the option of having a family is strictly for those that choose ‘straight’.

Anyway, the hostel is everything they imagined and more: slender young women shoot them come-hither looks, are totally chill to hang out in the spa with their tits out, and laugh at their inane jokes. Reader, our trio of lads go dancing, pop pills and eventually fuck their roommates to Willow’s Song, the alluring siren’s song performed by Britt Eckland as she seduces the copper in 1973’s hit cult flick The Wicker Man (incidentally, another movie about a community seducing and eventually murdering outsiders).

The problem? These are not sexually liberated tourists, having a laugh and shagging a bunch of goons for the fun of it. They, like Willow of The Wicker Man, are duplicitous: the sex is the primer for the betrayal, because we all know that sexually liberated women are up to no good.

• Come back tomorrow for Part 2, in which Alice looks at Hostel II – and its more prominent female characters – in more detail… EDIT: Read Part 2 here.
• By day, Alice Slater is a writer and bookseller from London. By night, she is a horror film addict who always keeps the lights on. She writes for Mslexia and Drunken Werewolf, and she blogs about veg*n high jinx at SmokinTofu.com.

Released in 1989, Disney’s The Little Mermaid heralded the start of the ‘Disney Renaissance’ – a period of critical and commercial success that followed a rocky patch where the studio’s prime focus had been on Disneyland attractions rather than feature films.

It was soundtracked by Broadway golden boy Howard Ashman, who changed the planned English butler crab into a Jamaican crustacean named Sebastian, and reworked the film’s structure to more closely align with that of a Broadway musical. He also decided to base Ursula the Sea Witch on drag artist and disco star Divine (who died whilst the film was still in production).

Ashman died of AIDS two years later, in March 1991, but his musical influence, first on Mermaid, and subsequently on Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, was a major factor in the regeneration of the studio in the early nineties. Mermaid won Oscar gongs for Best Song and Best Score, the first Oscar nod for Disney since the Seventies.

Mermaids of the Eighties

Splash!, 1984

The Disney studio had been considering Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid for adaptation as early as the Snow White years, but it was not until the late Eighties that the time finally seemed right. Even then, there was concern it might too closely duplicate Splash, which Disney had produced in 1984.

Splash itself had been rushed through production because there were rumours of another mermaid film in the pipeline elsewhere – a Warren Beatty vehicle that eventually fell through. Why exactly mermaids were suddenly in the ascendant during this particular period of the late twentieth century is open to speculation; at any rate, the nudity and adult content in Splash led directly to the creation of Touchstone Pictures, Disney’s ‘older audiences’ label. Mermaids (particularly Darryl Hannah’s mermaid) were too sexual for the family studio in 1984.

Ironically, of course, mermaid – “maiden of the sea” – suggests that these aquatic women are rather more virginal than ‘Touchstone Pictures’ thought. Traditional (cisnormative) misogynistic popular wisdom holds women in general to be ‘leaky vessels’, because of the amount of ‘moisture’ they produce, but though mermaids live in the water, they have no apparent human genitalia, making them, by contrast, vessels that are rather neatly sealed.

In this, they link with the Virgin Mary, who appears in Catholic symbolism as a ‘fountain forever sealed’ in the middle of an enclosed garden, representing the Immaculate Conception. Mary’s homonymic (and virginal) association with mermaids, and the link between the sea (mer) and the mother (mere) introduces an additional layer to this.

Alongside this, there is also a parallel virgin/whore tradition of the mermaid as prostitute and even embodied vagina (since, famously, vaginas are often described as smelling like fish).

The Starbucks logo, not abandoned until 1987.

This opposing strand presumably comes from sailors’ fear of the Siren-figure and the unknowns out in the sea, but it’s also connected with a different type of mermaid altogether – the melusine. A double-tailed half-woman, half-fish, her intrinsic, though hidden, fishiness only emerges when she takes a bath. Even then, the double tail leaves her human genitalia open to the world in what some have claimed is an appropriation of older symbols of female fertility, such as the Sheela na gig or even the goddess Venus (an alternative ‘mother’ connection).

Incidentally the melusine, not the mermaid, is the figure in the (now closely cropped) logo for Starbucks coffee, the first branch of which opened – logo blazing proud, bare-breasted and double-tailed – in 1971, a decade before Splash went into production.

The coffee-shop melusine was maintained in her full glory until 1987 (although she was ‘sealed’ at the point where the tails meet, as her original had not been); the first of several censoring crops came into effect around the time Disney bosses turned their attention to Andersen.

For a modern contrast to the ‘sealed off’ melusine, have a look at one of the mermaids commissioned by men’s deodorant brand Lynx for an early Noughties advertising campaign, whose posterior is beginning to resurface through her scales, soft porn-like.

Planning The Little Mermaid

Hans Christian Andersen’s original Little Mermaid tale was serviceable, but – much like Starbucks’ logo – it had to be sanitised before Disney could take it to a Disney audience. Tellingly, the changes proposed during this period of pre-production were substantially same as the ones suggested during the preliminary work in the Thirties.

Hans Christian Andersen, photographed by Thora Hallager

The first thing to do was give it a happy ending, since in Andersen’s version the Prince’s indifference to the mermaid results in her annihilation and transformation to ‘a daughter of the air’.

This was typical Andersen: he wrote that ‘most of what I have written is a reflection of myself’, and he was not a terribly happy man. Unreciprocated love was an ongoing feature of his life, and throughout it he nursed passions for various inappropriate people.

These included celebrity soprano Jenny Lind (who is said to have inspired his story The Nightingale after she put him firmly in the friendzone in 1844) and various straight men, but he also wrote of avoiding actual sexual encounters – his diary records him visiting prostitutes, talking to them, and then returning home to masturbate alone.

Many of his ‘fairy tales’ are characterised by violence, speechlessness and unreciprocated love, often across two different ‘species’, as with the tin soldier’s love for a paper ballerina in The Steadfast Tin Soldier, or indeed the Little Mermaid’s love for the human Prince – a feature that tends to make them, like their author, rather sexless in approach.

Although the sad stuff was scrapped, the symbolically significant speechlessness of the Mermaid was maintained in the Disney screenplay. A mermaid’s voice is her primary power, since her singing can lure sailors to their deaths, so its loss is a significant one – aphonia in a milder form had also been a feature of Splash, where Darryl Hannah’s character cannot initially speak English.

Disney’s Ariel was voiced by Broadway star (and Ashman associate) Jodi Benson, and her voice remains her defining beauty in the film. But the manner of its loss changes: while both Little Mermaids give their voices up to the Sea Witch, in Andersen’s story the unnamed mermaid has her tongue cut out to bring this about. Disney cleaned this up, and, in the process, rendered it reversible: Ariel’s voice is depicted as a glowing, ghostly ball that can pass through bodily barriers without drawing blood – as in traditional artistic representations of the soul.

Ironically, this is exactly what Andersen’s mermaid is seeking: her love for the prince is the means through which she hopes to win ‘immortality’ and the chance to share in the joys of paradise. (This rather Romantic notion, albeit gender-inverted, links Andersen’s tale thematically with Friedrich de la Motte’s mermaid Undine – and also Tchaikovsky’s watery Swan Lake, composed in 1875, the year Andersen died). Disney refocused the mermaid’s longing for a soul to a more secular – and sexualised – teenage quest for the love of a handsome prince.

She sells sea shells

But Disney hit a problem when it came to the artwork. Mermaids, of course, are typically bare-breasted, but so too were traditional depictions of Andersen’s ‘little’ mermaid, including the statue in Copenhagen’s harbour.

The Little Mermaid loud and proud in Copenhagen’s harbour

There is not a single illustration to the fairy tale pre-Disney that shows her wearing anything at all over her chest – in the case of Heath Robinson, this emphasises the ‘Little’ part, as the mermaid is clearly a child in his illustrations.

The mermaid is fifteen in Andersen’s tale, so her littleness could be argued either way, but in 1989 Disney producers obviously decided they wanted her to be legal (in most states anyway). To make it completely clear, in the course of the film Ariel declares to her father (a familiar refrain) ‘I’m sixteen years old. I’m not a child.’

But however innocently naked (and animated) the Little Mermaid might be, Disney certainly could not show a sixteen year old’s breasts on screen. Their solution to this problem was the creation of a purple bra made out of shells – a new mermaid first.

When coupled with the waistband-like arrangement at the top of her tail (another innovation, since traditionally the mermaid’s scales segue gradually from the skin at her waist), this decision had the effect of creating a kind of mermaid bikini that implies she might just be wearing an elaborate two-piece – one very similar, in fact, to the ensemble worn by Princess Jasmine in Disney’s next film, Aladdin. And, of course, it also has the effect of emphasising breasts and hips either side of a tiny waist.

The Barbie-style Ariel doll I had as a child had (as modern-day packaging still asserts) ‘removable clothes for costume change‘, so it was clear she was a two-legged being with an optional tail.

This has the effect of making the transition from mermaid to human much easier: in Andersen’s story, creating two legs out of one fish tail is exactly as vicious as you would expect it to be, and the draught the mermaid drinks to effect this causes the sensation of ‘a two-edged sword [passing] through her delicate body’ – so severe she passes out. Throughout her subsequent time on land, each foot she puts to the ground feels like ‘treading upon the points of needles or sharp knives’.

Bodily mutilation – indeed, mortification – is everywhere in Andersen’s story. After everyone is asleep, the mermaid goes to ‘sit on the broad marble steps [of the palace] for it eased her burning feet to bathe them in the cold sea-water’. Significantly – and somewhat bizarrely – such mutilation has been an ongoing problem for the Copenhagen representation of Andersen’s mermaid: the statue in the harbour has been blown up, decapitated (twice) and had its arm sawn off, in addition to many petty acts of vandalism since its erection in 1913.

Some liberation?

By contrast with Andersen’s difficult transition, Ariel’s easy-on, easy-off fish tail and bikini bra combo not only ‘re-opens’ the traditional closed mermaid vessel, it also sexualises the teenage mermaid in a manner markedly different from anything in Andersen’s original (where the mermaid’s love is increased by knowledge of the prince’s good deeds, and her longing for a soul).

The Little Mermaid – Disney’s artwork

By censoring Ariel, Disney draws attention to her body and breasts, so she resembles a California surfer girl. The nakedness, which in earlier illustrations was straightforward and childlike, takes on an explicitly sexual edge (for more on this, have a look at this piece by Virginia Borges).

The result is that Disney’s Little Mermaid becomes the straightforward tale of a sixteen-year-old struggling with her father for the right to explore her burgeoning sexuality and go out with a boy. And because she ultimately uses this right to make a good marriage (wearing something strikingly similar to the dress worn by the equally speechless Princess Diana at her 1981 marriage), Ariel makes good in the end and everyone is happy.

Like most of the Disney Renaissance heroines, hers is the story of a successful transition from the rule of the father to the rule of the husband.

Other mermaids

But it’s interesting that at the same time the producers were working on a heteronormative middle-class fantasy idea, their musical wunderkind Howard Ashman (despite dying of what, at the time, was popularly cast as a very non-family-friendly disease) was injecting some Broadway pizzazz into the soundtrack. This included the introduction of a deviantly-styled figure like Divine via the character of Ursula, the Sea Witch (though of course she is defeated, as does not happen in Andersen).

In fact, as the Disney Renaissance got going, the calibre of stars from distinctly non-Disney backgrounds increased: The Lion King, the Renaissance nadir, had major Broadway stars alongside A-list Hollywood stars, and the cast included black and Latino actors – something that had not even been considered back in the Forties (when Uncle Walt wanted some racial-caricature ‘Jim Crow’ figures in Dumbo, the crows were voiced by white men doing their best ‘black man’ impression instead). The staff list at the Disney studios was full of Jewish and homosexual figures like Ashman. Yet The Little Mermaid ushered in some of the most socially conservative films Disney produced. A strange duality.

• Like it says above, Hodge is currently doing a dedicated project on mermaids over at Poems Underwater, which is inviting submissions…
• @PoemsUnderwater
• Poems Underwater on Facebook

In Silver Linings Playbook, the menace is all in in the mind – it’s a film about mental illness. It is presumably for this reason that director David O. Russell has chosen to reproduce that shower scene in it – though, represented via a series of individual flashbacks, he’s added some more visceral cuts into it, as well as a middle-aged professor who’s having an affair with this Norman Bates’s wife.

The film follows Pat (Bradley Cooper), who is bipolar, and his quest to get his marriage back together after returning home from a psychiatric hospital. We learn that his most recent breakdown was precipitated on discovering his wife Nikki in the aforementioned shower with a colleague; he attacked the man, which brought him up against assault charges and eventually landed him in the institution. Back home at the beginning of the film, Pat wants to get Nikki, and his marriage, back – despite his continuing mood swings, refusal to take medication and restraining order.

Then he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a young woman whose husband has recently died in traumatic circumstances. She is similarly Troubled (she’s been fired for sleeping with all her co-workers) and they hit it off, in a vague way. She agrees to take a letter to Nikki if Pat will partner her in a dance competition.

The inevitable happens.

If you listen to Hollywood, there are dance competitions happening in every small town, every three minutes, just waiting for someone to do some self-actualisation through dance – as in dance movie stalwarts such as Strictly Ballroom, Flashdance or, its British equivalent, the Arts Council-funded Billy Elliot. This one brings plenty of opportunities for personal development, which – though not so pronounced as the ur-dance movies – is actually why Pat agrees to do it: he wants to prove to Nikki that he has changed, and grown, since the shower incident. Cinematic history tells him this is the way to do it.

But nonetheless, in Silver Linings Playbook, development through dance is not really the point: the dancing pops up towards the second half of the film, and while the rehearsals do force the characters to spend a lot of time doing semi-erotic stuff together, it’s not the primary impetus behind their falling in love.

Indeed, if you accept that dance in golden-era Hollywood is usually implied sex¹, often in the context of romantic relationships between show-people who dance as part of their job (here, Fred Astaire tries to win Ann Miller back as his g/f by getting her to do the dance they perform on stage), you could say that Silver Linings is less about sex than it is about Feelings.

Feelings (that’s a capital F), are by contrast the preserve of the classic romcom, which – a true product of the Eighties – features extended, over-analytical examinations of the Self. It’s Hugh Grant and Woody Allen being neurotic and too self-aware; it’s realising you’re in love just in time to run down an aeroplane. It’s the power of the mind – its hopes, fears and wants – to overcome practical obstacles. And in Silver Linings Playbook, as I say, it’s all about the mind. It’s a romcom for the post-Hugh Grant generation, if you will.

Now, personally, I didn’t find the treatment of mental health as offensive as I know some did – David O. Russell has commented in interviews that he drew a lot from the experience of having a son with bipolar disorder, which does help. One thing that did bug me, though, was its pairing of a bipolar man with longstanding mental health issues with a hypersexual woman recovering from a traumatic bereavement. Pat’s problems are longstanding, but Tiffany’s troubles clearly have their origin in grief, and they happen to manifest themselves in a pattern of sexual behaviour that, as recounted, elicits visible salivation from her male companion. We might say, in fact, that in this film, there is Serious Mental Illness, and there is Sexy Mental Illness. That Pat’s initial crime puts him in the cinematic shoes of Norman Bates, whose murder is at root sexually motivated – though it is repeated here as a grotesque husband-on-lover attack – underscores this, though admittedly at one remove.

This is why the Psycho crib, for me, was a key moment – and partly because its appearance in the film is so downright weird. It parallels the dance competition trope as an interjection of popular film history, but I suppose it also draws together some of the film’s key themes: notably, though arguably ironically, psychosis (Hitchcock’s film played a major part in popularising the slang word psycho) and what you might very crudely call Hollywood ‘monster-cam’.

I suppose one reason for including the scene (something I spent a long time puzzling over) was that, by putting the audience in the eye-view of a man mid-breakdown unleashing his rage upon two people who happen to be naked (and one of them a woman) shows the terrible power of the mental threats the film explores: we see their vulnerability, and we are invited to consider the gender issues the attack brings to the surface. Within the context of the plot, it makes sense of Nikki’s need for a restraining order and perhaps even makes an ironic comment on the thigh-rubbing Hitchcock is widely accepted to have been doing throughout his own shower scene. It certainly makes you think back to the portrayal of mental illness in the deeply exploitative Psycho. In that sense, Silver Linings Playbook actually comes out reasonably well.

So, should you go and see it? I’d imagine if you were going to, you’ll have done so by now. But I think it’s worth seeing – despite those dodgy gender politics, it certainly makes you think.

1. Considerably less ‘implied’ in the 1980s, as with the eponymous moves of Dirty Dancing.

Oh, readers. I’ve done that thing again. I’ve gone and seen Les Miserables without having seen the musical or read the book and now I’m writing about it without the massive burning swollen bladder of fandom that everyone else seems to have about it, and as such, will probably sound a bit naive. I had literally no idea what it was about. Well, apart from “France” and “revolution” and some presumably rather miserable people and – something that was used to successfully sell the whole thing to me – pretty young men draped attractively about the place in military uniform, covered in blood. Oh, and Hugh Jackman singing. He apparently does lots of musicals in Australia, and I was curious to know what that was like, since I know him primarily as the not-very-musical-ready Wolverine.

Maybe I should just hand in my human card at the desk.

Did I like it? Well… yes. I think? Sort of. There was a lot that I found either directly unappealing or straight-up baffling, but overall, there was sufficient stuff in there to make me want to see it onstage. And, well, I’m a sucker for musicals.

The main thing about this film is that it suffers from being a film. There are things that you can only do in the magical reality of the stage, and this particular production (directed by Tom Hooper) tries on the whole gritty reality thing (except with people singing all the time) and therefore can’t get away with similar tricks and tactics. This is most glaringly obvious in how they depict (or not) the passage of time. There were some bits that were completely confusing because I just couldn’t tell whether or not time was meant to have passed or not. For example, on stage, as my stage-show-fan friend tells me, Fantine (Anne Hathaway) can waft in and out of the set to show many days passing between her selling her hair and her teeth before eventually being forced by circumstance into becoming a sex worker. In the film, it looked like she’d lost her job, and then immediately sold everything in her face and became a sex worker.

I was like, wow that’s a terrible afternoon.

It happened again after Cosette’s (Amanda Seyfried) wedding. “I can never tell my adopted daughter that I’m an ex-con!,” Valjean howls, sheathing his Adamantium talons and fleeing for the hills, where he staggers into a convent and casually dies in the corner. I assumed he’d had an ill-publicised heart attack in the carriage on the way over.

The next problem I had with Les Mis was the way Valjean was so suffused with his role as apparently French Ex-Con Jesus that for me he ended up being completely impossible to identify with. I found his motives and decisions inexplicable to the point of being hilarious. I wanted to have the film retitled “Jean Valjean’s Baffling Sequence Of Life Choices” because in this rendition at least, he comes off as too saintly, too self-righteous and too… incongruously self-sacrificial for me to see him as a real person and empathise with him. Ever.

“Also I have to dive out of this window now lol bye” “YOU BAFFLING SCOUNDREL”

And what on earth was going on with the cinematography when anyone was having a solo? With a stage show, if someone has a solo, you’ve got them as a figure in context with the set, the extras, all embalmed in live music. So you can empathise with them properly because there’s this whole holistic musical experience going on. Not so with the film, where the director has decided that the best way to make you empathise with the solo singer is to have a VERY TIGHT CLOSE-UP of the singer’s face, slightly off-centre, while they cry and sing at the same time. This is not how you make your audience empathise with anyone or anything. I found myself wondering how they’d done Anne Hathaway’s makeup while the rest of the cinema sobbed around me.

Has now sported this look in about 32,412 films, but is working it

Right, time to talk about Javert. As my more long-term readers will know, I’m a villainsexual creep, and my darling friend who kindly dragged me from my Doom Fortress to see this flick accurately predicted that I’d have the hots for Javert. She was not wrong. I have never before fancied Russell Crowe in anything ever (in fact, quite the opposite) but I honestly found Javert the only character that I empathised with and found engaging and explicable. Plus, he’s got an attractive array of uniforms and shiny boots. In fact, that was a great way to tell – in the absence of any bloody thing else – the passage of time. It had to be later on: Javert had MOAR BRAID. I’m okay with that. Time-keeping through the medium of men in uniform? I’m deleting my phone’s clock app this afternoon.

I actually quite enjoyed the fatalistic pointlessness of barricade-building rich white boys¹ harping on about no longer being slaves and changing the world and then being run over with cannons. That was grand. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see a structures-of-oppression-ruining bloody revolution, but this is a film, and I’m a bloodthirsty little boy with the need for something hard and horrible to counteract Valjean’s large-overcoated saintliness, so I was overwhelmed with the beauty of their cataclysmic failure. So beautiful. So horrible. So… uh.

Deserves better than Marius, period. In fact, deserves own, better-orchestrated revolution not being led by Marius & co.

Now, Eponine (Samantha Barks). Eponine is meant to be an empathic, sadface-inducing character, and she’s sweet and earnest and I rather liked her. But Marius, the guy she’s in love with, is so boring. I just wanted her to get over it and find someone interesting who doesn’t apparently fall madly in love with people when he glimpses their hats from a distance through a crowd.

It’s always nice to see Helena Bonham-Carter reprising her timeless role of “Cackling Woman With Hair” (I don’t think they even give her a costume, do they? That’s all just her wardrobe), too. And I sincerely hope that after playing Signor Pirelli in Sweeney Todd, Sasha Baron-Cohen is typecast as Musical Skeevy Comic Relief for the rest of his life and never plays another vaguely-veiled bigoted stereotype ever again.

Overall, it really wasn’t as miserable as I was expecting. Valjean lives a long and successful life, Cosette and the boring Marius (the gorgeous Eddie Redmayne) get married, Fantine’s wishes are vindicated, all that stuff, and everyone dies happily ever after with a rousing song about sticking it to the man. All this talk about how much sobbing it elicits from people generally makes me wonder if someone’s snuck into my room at night and glued my tearducts shut. It struck me as generally rather uplifting and “Oh well! Songs and Christian Love!” rather than “DESPAIR AND CHIPS FOR EVERYONE”.

To summarise! YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• The music is genuinely brilliant. Believe the hype.
• Everyone plays really, really well. Flawless performances from Anne Hathaway (in particular), Wolverine, and even Russell “Are You Not Entertained?” Crowe, who has a spectacularly grizzly, stoic turn as Javert
• It really does look exceedingly good

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• I’m not sure how many of the characters feel like real people, honestly
• It suffers from its own medium in a few glaringly obvious and immersion-breaking ways
• It feels pretty obnoxiously long, but that might just have been me and my bladder having a disagreement
• People do sing pretty much all the time and you might be allergic to musicals, but if you’re allergic to musicals WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO SEE LES MISERABLES

1. Ed’s Tiny Note: are they meant to be an underclass? Despite Eddie Redmayne being a Rather Cut-Glass Etonian ;). Anyone read Hugo/able to verify how they’re meant to come across?!

Everybody has an opinion about Quentin Tarantino. Is he racist for using the ‘N’ word so often in his scripts? Is he a genius, or a copycat? Is he some sort of sicko, in love with violence for its own sake? Can he act? (No, he can’t.)

But underneath the gore, profanity, and wooden cameos, is there anything for feminists to celebrate? As unlikely as it sounds, I think there is.

Tarantino has written some pretty amazing parts for women. He puts them on screen, not just as eye candy or the girlfriends of the heroes, but as people with stories of their own to tell. They know how to defend themselves and their friends, and they do their own stunts. They fight (and dance) barefoot, and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.

This isn’t to say that the man himself is a feminist icon, or that his films are entirely unproblematic. Some of the violence perpetrated against the women characters has an uncomfortably voyeuristic feel to it, and every now and again his films feel more like depictions of his own sexual fantasies rather than true fiction. He professes a love for ‘strong women’ (he grew up with a single mother), but this sexualisation of women characters does call his motives into question.

It’s worth bearing in mind though, that these characters haven’t sprung new and fully formed from Tarantino’s imagination – they’re loving reimaginations of the deadly but beautiful women of the B-movies and exploitation flicks Tarantino watched as a youngster. These women were usually a bit too ‘empowered’ for their own good, and often ended up getting their comeuppance. Dodgy source material, sure, but Tarantino regularly flips this trope on its head. The rapists, murderers and crooks in his movies rarely escape without feeling the wrath of their female ‘victims’.

Try watching Zoe Bell playing ‘Ship’s Mast’ at 100mph without feeling a heart-swelling sense of sisterly pride. And I don’t know a woman who has seen Pulp Fiction and not thought Mia Wallace would be a pretty sassy best friend (if it weren’t for the cocaine abuse).

As feminists, we sometimes have to dig about in the mud of misogyny to find some empowering gold dust. In honour of that, here’s a rundown of the baddest, sassiest women in QT’s weird world.

Mia Wallace (Pulp Fiction)

Oh, Mia Wallace. The woman who spawned a million copycat hairstyles. She doesn’t kick any ass, except in a twist contest, but she’s a seriously cool customer.

Did her husband Marsellus really throw a man over a balcony for giving her a foot-rub? Maybe not, but it’s easy to see why he might. Everybody in the movie is afraid of him, and perhaps so is Mia (she asks Vincent not to tell him about the overdose), but she seems to do pretty much what she wants anyway.

She flirts with Vincent over dinner, and we never find out what might have happened between them had she not mistaken his heroin for cocaine. Something of an enigma, she’s a sassy, straight-talking woman with a preference for silence over chatter (“That’s when you know you’ve found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence.”) This combination of beauty and brains seems to have a profound effect on the men who meet her, and enables her to survive in her world populated by crooks and murderers.

Jackie Brown (Jackie Brown)

Jackie Brown is a black woman in her forties, and the star of the movie that bears her name as its title. In the youth-obsessed, whitewashed culture of Hollywood, this is exciting and unusual in itself (depressing, huh?).

The legendary Pam Grier plays a flight attendant, who works for a crappy airline. She makes some extra bucks on the side by smuggling in ill-gotten cash for a gun-dealer named Ordell, until she gets busted.

As she says: “Well, I’ve flown seven million miles. And I’ve been waiting on people almost 20 years. The best job I could get after my bust was Cabo Air, which is the worst job you can get in this industry. I make about sixteen thousand, with retirement benefits that ain’t worth a damn. And now with this arrest hanging over my head, I’m scared. If I lose my job I gotta start all over again, but I got nothing to start over with. I’ll be stuck with whatever I can get. And that shit is scarier than Ordell.”

But Jackie is a survivor in the truest sense of the word. When things look bad for her, she takes matters into her own hands, using her brains and courage to rip off the gangsters and escape a jail sentence in one outrageously brave scheme.

She plans everything herself, knows who she can trust, and isn’t afraid to turn a gun on a man who she knows to be a killer. She’s a smart, older, black woman who, despite being a total fox (Foxy Brown, geddit?), doesn’t use her sexuality to get ahead. With media portrayal of black women usually relying heavily on sexualized stereotypes, Jackie Brown is a breath of fresh air.

The Bride / Beatrix Kiddo (Kill Bill)

When people talk about ‘empowered’ female characters in Tarantino movies, Beatrix Kiddo is who they’re usually thinking of. The woman is dragged through hell backwards, and still manages to exact bloody revenge on everybody who hurt her, or kept her from her child.

The trope of the vengeful woman is not a particularly progressive one. But Beatrix Kiddo is no ‘bunny boiler’. She was shot in the head and left for dead, raped whilst in a coma, and led to believe that her unborn child had died. As much as we might find the gore and violence hard to stomach, it’s hard to argue with her motives. From Beatrix herself: “It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality.”

She’s a woman who knows how to protect herself, and believes her life is worth fighting for. Even when she’s been buried alive, it’s still impossible to see her as a victim. And she’s not the only strong woman in the film (although she’s the only one you’re rooting for).

The women in Kill Bill are scrappy. The fights between The Bride and other female ex-members of the Deadly Viper Assasination Squad aren’t sexy ‘girl fights’. They fight with skill, knocking seven shades of shit out of each other with terrifying ferocity. They’re fighting for their lives, and it isn’t pretty.

But The Bride isn’t just violent and vengeful. She’s a mother who longs to be reunited with her child. Somehow, this duality doesn’t cause the dissonance you would expect. She’s a three-dimensional character, more than capable of being many different things at once. The shock of that highlights just how rare it is in a Hollywood film.

Zoe Bell, Kim and Abernathy (Death Proof)

Death Proof is a film of two halves, linked by one gross, murderous ex-stunt driver. In the first half, he stalks and kills a group of beautiful friends with his car. But we know that in Tarantino’s world, creeps don’t get away with things like that. When he attempts to do the same thing with another group of women, he makes a fatal error by messing with a stuntwoman, stunt driver, and their super-cool make-up artist friend.

I have some serious qualms about the first half, as the violence perpetrated against the victims is fetishised to an almost ludicrous degree. But things take a turn for the better when Zoe Bell and her pals (played by Tracie Thorns and Rosario Dawson) arrive on screen.

Zoe Bell is a real-life stuntwoman, who plays herself in this movie. When you see her perched on the bonnet of a car being driven at 100 mph, that’s really her, and she’s really doing that. Which is wicked cool.

Stuntman Mike grows tired of chasing these women who refuse to be victims, but they haven’t finished with him. Instead of letting him get away, they go after him. And their intentions are clear, with Abernathy declaring “Let’s kill this bastard.”

In the real world, women rarely receive justice for the violence they experience. Although this vigilante-style justice is probably not what we want for our own society (however satisfying it might be), watching it on screen is incredibly cathartic. When Abernathy puts the final boot into Stuntman Mike, the urge to cheer is almost overwhelming.

Shoshanna (Inglourious Basterds)

Shoshanna is the self-styled “face of Jewish vengeance” in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s ‘creative’ re-imagining of World War Two. She escapes the ‘Jew Hunter’, who kills her whole family whilst they are in hiding. When we next see her, she’s running a cinema in occupied Paris, where the Nazis want to screen their latest propaganda film.

As painful as this is to her, she sees it as an opportunity to exact revenge for what was done to her family, and other Jewish families across Europe. Her single-minded resolve, and calm in the face of extraordinary pressure, is the perfect foil to the disastrous exploits of the Basterds.

Women in war films are usually relegated to the roles of tearful wife or showgirl. In Inglourious Basterds, it is a woman who changes the course of the war, and thus history. This epitomises one of the key attributes of Tarantino’s women: agency. They make decisions for themselves that change their lives, and the lives of others around them.

Of course, we know that women made a huge and valuable contribution to the war effort, in many different ways. It’s just a shame that it took a film with a fictionalised version of history to depict a woman having any sort of meaningful involvement in the conflict.

So, there you have it. Those are my own favourite Tarantino women. Broomhilda from Django Unchained didn’t quite make it in, as I’ve only seen it once. But I think she should get an honourable mention here, if only for surviving.

Obviously, Tarantino’s movies are far from perfect feminism-wise, and the man himself doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to saying sexist douchebag things. But with so few interesting or positive representations of women on-screen, we should celebrate the few characters who break the mould. Especially if they make us leave the cinema feeling a little cooler, a little braver and a little more willing to stand up for ourselves.

• Lydia Harris likes to think of herself as a grownup Wednesday Addams. Her pasty complexion is the result of watching movies and snacking during the day with the curtains closed, instead of going out to enjoy ‘fresh air’. She tweets as @lydiasquidia, and blogs (infrequently) about pop culture and feminism at myswimsuitissues.blogspot.com.