Tag: Grindhouse

Horror Week 2012: 7 Great Heroines from Scary Movies

Guest post written by Candice Frederick. Originally published at Reel Talk. Cross-posted with permission.
Continuing our festive Halloween coverage, we bring you a list of our favorite female heroes from scary movies. Whether they’re your favorite characters are not, you have to give them props for not dying (right away, at least). Check it out:
Ali Larter as Clear Rivers in Final Destination
CLEAR RIVERS (Final Destination): Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) started out as a throwaway character, just one of the many victims who would be annihilated by her own fate in the freak accident-prone Final Destination. But once she used her noggin and started outwitting the big, bad fate, audiences realized that she could not only protect herself, but also protect new victims. When she checked herself into a mental facility in the second movie, to steer clear of flying daggers, speeding buses and any other unfastened and uninhibited objects, you just knew this chick was badass. She was a true hero and surely the most memorable character in the franchise.
Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley in Aliens
ELLEN RIPLEY (Aliens): This is perhaps the only scary movie where the villain (a 7-foot alien) was actually slightly intimidated by the intended victim, in this case a female lieutenant trapped on board an alien-infested ship. If she was ever frightened by the aliens, Ripley rarely showed it. As one of the only women on the ship, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) often swooped down to save her fellow male shipmates from becoming dinner for the aliens without hardly breaking a sweat. This is why we love her.
Milla Jovovich as Alice in Resident Evil
ALICE (Resident Evil): Well, what do you know? Four movies later and our favorite military officer is still drop-kicking flesh-eating scientists and taking names. As countless others fell prey to these monsters, Alice (Milla Jovovich) is the only character to outlive even the smartest of them. She’s sexy, she’s wise and even manages to have a few clever one-liners hidden in her vest. What’s not to love?
Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode in Halloween
LAURIE STRODE (Halloween): Arguably one of the most iconic heroines in cinema, babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) wasn’t actually much of a hero, at first. She was tormented by her lunatic older brother Michael Myers in the first two movies. But in later installments, the character became less of a frightened victim and more of a pissed off nemesis for the villain. She was pure entertainment.
Heather Langenkamp as Nancy Thompson in Nightmare on Elm Street
NANCY THOMPSON (Nightmare On Elm Street): There’s something about Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) that was ever so enticing for Mr. Knives-For-Fingers himself, Freddy Krueger. He loved tormenting her. It really just seemed like great fun for him. But Freddy treated her as someone who was hard to kill, like he was almost frustrated because she knew how to deal with him–she knew his weaknesses and that made her as prey interesting. Her awesomeness made the rest of us brilliant insomniacs.
Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott in Scream
SIDNEY PRESCOTT (Scream): Neve Campbell, who plays the eternal victim from the Scream movies, never really was much of an actress. But she found her niche as Sidney, the high school student whose mother’s death made her prime victim for a series of murders plaguing a small town. Like many other heroines before her, the murderers (different in every movie) would often get outsmarted or outrun by Sidney. She carried that perfect balance of sheepish victim and maniacal prey that we viewers love.
Kate Beckinsale as Selene in Underworld
SELENE (Underworld): Never since Buffy, the Vampire Slayer has an inter-breed romance been so juicy on the big screen. And that’s partly due to Kate Beckinsale’s Selene, a vampire caught between her love for a werewolf right in the middle of the famous vampire/werewolf civil war. Selene is beautiful, seductive, and can terrorize a vampire just as quick as she can destroy a threatening werewolf. She’s so much fun to watch.
Rose McGowan as Cherry Darling in Grindhouse: Planet Terror
CHERRY DARLING (Grindhouse: Planet Terror): Only Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) could help destroy a town of melting zombies with one leg. After losing her leg in an unfortunate zombie match, wannabe comedienne Cherry props up her missing leg with a random stick (courtesy of ex-boyfriend, Wray). Stumbling at first with her new limb, Cherry later kicked countless zombie butt with her stick leg-turned-machine gun leg, whipping around fences and driving getaway trucks. Not to mention she had killer comedic wit. She became the best handicapped heroine of scary movies.

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Candice Frederick is an NABJ award-winning journalist and film blogger for Reel Talk. She’s also written for Essence Magazine and The Urban Daily. Follow her on twitter.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Machete

Machete(2010)

This is a cross post from Heroine Content.

Trigger warning here for a joke from the movie concerning sexual assault, which is mentioned briefly at the end of this post.)
 
Ah, Machete. What I remember best about Machete, unfortunately, is the phone call I got as the credits started to roll. It was my mother in law, telling me my three year old had fallen off a love seat onto a tile floor, landing on his head, and now he was saying his head was buzzing and his tongue felt funny. Everything turned out okay, but now Danny Trejo will likely always be linked for me with my son’s possible concussion and the Dell Children’s emergency room. It’s a shame, because I really like him. If I could re-link that memory to Jessica Alba, I would, but after Fantastic Four that there just isn’t room for more Jessica Alba pain associations in my neural pathways.
Before all of that excitement, though, I’m pretty sure I saw a film that included two things.
First, I saw multiple people of color, including women, as the forces of good in an action film about the concerns of hardworking, decent people who just happen to be one of the most villanized groups in my home state of Texas – Mexicans and Mexican-Americans! In this film, these people are the real heroes, and for a lovely change of pace in media, the U.S. is portrayed with just as much corruption as Mexico, if not moreso because of all the hypocrisy.
I thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the film, especially when Team Good got to kick major ass.
(This is where some drive-by commenter is going to come along and be all “are you really anti-racist or are you just against white people?” just like happened on my review of Batman Returns. I’m not sure why people do the drive-bys. Do they think I’m going to be struck by the insightfulness of their observations and get therapy to resolve my virulent anti-white-people agenda?)
Unfortunately, in addition to the righteous ass-kicking by people of color for great justice, the second thing I saw while watching Machete was a film that ruthlessly exploited women for the glorification of a male action hero and the satisfaction of the male gaze, and it was really fucking disappointing.
To get this across better, let’s take a look at the nurses:

The nurses
Electra Avellan and Elise Avellan play the nurses, and I love them. They work in a hospital for The Network, an underground resistance movement that assists Mexicans who immigrate into Texas. I’m not sure they have any medical skills, as their main responsibility in caring for the wounded Machete seems to be comforting him with eye candy, but they are on the side of good and they wear fantastic platform heels and shoot things and I have absolutely no problem with any of that. If sexy nurses with machine guns can’t be part of your revolution, then I don’t want any. 
(That’s not what you thought I was going to say, was it?)
In a feminist utopia I think the nurses could still exist in a movie, because I think there are a lot of women who would find that a lot of fun, and for good reasons. When Grace reviewed Grindhouse, which included Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, she said this:
…the whole package pays homage to/makes fun of the “grindhouse,” which is a beaten-down movie theater that plays double-bills of B movies. […] Now that we’re clear that these are supposed to be B movies, that they are hearkening back to and a parody of a specific kind of film, then we can skip all of the ways in which they are typically sexist. Yes, there are copious bare breasts and ass shots, women are called bitch all over the place, sexual violence is threatened (though, and I thought this was telling, never actually enacted) […] If there is any chance of you enjoying Grindhouse, or finding anything about it to be subversive or interesting, you are going to have to consider these things part of the kitsch that Rodriguez and Tarantino are playing with and move on.

To me, the nurses are part of that kitsch. They’re a lighthearted genre trapping. What I DO have a problem with is that almost every other woman with a speaking part in this movie is basically the exact same character as the nurses, just in different clothes. They exist to fawn over the hero, look hot for the audience, and kick ass, without any distracting personal goals or motivations.
From the naked woman who betrays Machete and stabs him in the leg with his own knife to win a drug lord’s favor, to Jessica Alba’s ambitious INS agent whose career ambitions are quickly sacrificed to furthering his quest, to Cheryl Chin’s turn as the Dragon Lady enforcer for the drug lord, to Lindsay Lohan’s drugged out, often naked internet porn star (who gets used sexually by Machete to humiliate her father, in a plotline I thought was beyond atrocious), there there is barely a hint of any female activity that does not revolve around men. Michelle Rodriguez’s Luz comes close, but even she is ready to turn over leadership to Machete as quickly as possible, anointing him leader of her desired revolution. (For all Rodriguez’s talk in the media lately about how she wants to be typecast as the bad-ass instead of the boring girlfriend, I was expecting a little more.) Alba and Rodriguez even get new costumes late in the movie to make them fit better into the nurse paradigm, and the results are not awesome.
Lately I’ve been reading some of the Criminal comic book series by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, and it’s gotten me thinking about women in genre fiction. Criminal is specifically noir crime fiction, and when you read that kind of fiction, you know from the get-go that the dame is going to be trouble. I would argue that action movies are almost as bad for prescribing the roles female characters must play, and B movies doubly so. So if you’re going to create in a genre like that, how do you work with your female characters in a way that’s not horribly sexist? How do you give them agency? How do you give them personalities and missions in their lives beyond their usefulness as plot points for the hero?
Let me tell you, the people who made Machete haven’t asked themselves any of those questions. Or if they have, they’re doing it wrong. “All your babes are belong to our sexy stereotype” is not creating strong female characters, regardless of how many guns you give them. Turning all women into genrelicious Barbie is not staying within the genre, it’s turning them into objects. You could argue that the men in this film are also stereotypes, but damn, at least they get to have clothes on!
I desperately want to give this film some stars. The way the film treats women, though, is appalling. The rape joke made by Machete’s brother when Machete brings two drugged, naked women to his church was also not okay.
No stars.
Skye Kilaen blogs about women kicking ass in action films at Heroine Content, where the unofficial slogan is “Helping feminists with their Netflix queues since 2006.”