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sgable-60549
Reviews
Vredens dag (1943)
Finding Love in Times of Witch Hunt, Torture of Lower Classes, and Child Brides
Faith is no consolation in any witch hunt film--let's get that out of the way. When does faith lessen the torture or douse the flames that burn out life?
After the young wife and her pious husband come to the joint realization that their marriage was never a love match, the wife finds solace with another. In the end, she admits to being a witch as her lover takes the side of grandmother, who admits hating the young woman.
Which is worse--the older man never loving his child bride or the younger man who deserts her in her time of need?
Men are seen repeatedly, panned by the camera, to expose how one-sided and misogynistic they are, bullying a single woman at a time.
It's always sad to see no sign of witches, but plenty witch hunters and bonfires inflicted upon mostly uneducated women.
There cannot be a loss of faith, as the faith I saw was thread bare and easily disposed of when the will called for that. No man was brave enough to care who was at the stake. Faith was an outward piety and means of control.
One should not have to take up arms against a loved one for specious religion's sake. The folk were superstitious, and the director counted on this and on the audience being easily swayed when he inserted his artful scenes of changing weather. "It was a dark and rainy night...."
I would watch this again in examining it as folk horror. I see nothing admirable in in this film on the witch hunt in particular.
This is provoked by a review I read which found "powerful" love and belief dictate the lives of fearful women.
Antichrist (2009)
Why Antichrist is a 10 for me
From the first scenes of the movie, I had great expectations for luscious camera work and composition. The loss of a child occurred amid the sublime photography. I was not disappointed right up to the very end.
Antichrist was not a gore story to me. It was a story of a domineering husband/therapist who takes his wife to their cabin on a secluded mountain side and tries to analyze her troubled soul. (Therapists should not help to heal their own.)
What ensues includes angry, animal sex (mostly wanted by the wife), and this degrades into an out and out fight leading to the death of one of them.
We can't discount that the woman is a woman's study student working on a thesis. The husband, exploring the attic, finds signs of the occult and maps to other women engaged in freeing themselves from the insistence of men. He suspects that so hateful is she that anything goes in their domestic war.
The gory parts of the fight truly add to the story as one-upmanship is the name of the game. A hiding place. Seemingly placed "tools." Clever moves that destroy the large male's dominance (he does not want to start a physical war--she prepares him by asking for rough sex.
The end seems perfect to take into account what has come before. What we and he know.
Deadgirl (2008)
Compelling Accident--Could Not Look Away (1 spoiler)
A fresh turn on the zombie movie: I no longer watch braindead bodies eating their own or the living. The seminal of this sub-genre of horror remains Night of the Living Dead, which tells a bleak story of humanity and tribes.
I was surprised to happen upon an often-viewed channel at no extra cost, which I took as open to the general public.
Deadgirl subverts the zombie formula having young males find and use her. It was not pretty, but it was daring and unexpected. And I dislike viewing the same old tropes repeatedly.
Gives me hope for a classic sub-genre's renewal.