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By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies
Read More: Bizare Movie Deaths
Imagine a lurid, oversized movie poster that spotlights a grief-stricken hulk crouched over a dead, half-naked hottie, the stark tableau emblazoned with a blood-red tagline: "The Mob slaughtered his wife and left him for dead!" Grabby. But it's unlikely we'll dash for the box office if that come-on wimps out with: "And now he must find it in his heart to forgive these poor, misguided souls!"
No sirree, the promo that hits us where we live would blare, "And now, Sledge is coming for her killers, one corpse at a time ... stone-cold vengeance just hit town!" From "Hamlet" to "The Toxic Avenger," it's revenge that supercharges story lines, delivers red-hot action and atrocity, gets us high on the adrenalin of getting even -- and sends us home morally right with the world.
A dish best served cold -- or hot, depending on your taste -- revenge spices up Westerns, science-fiction, film noir, ghost stories, every genre there is. Though the desire to settle old scores drives almost all superheroes, Marvel Comics' "Ghost Rider" is a leader of the pack: a supernatural agent of vengeance who forces bad-to-the-bone sinners to relive their evil deeds -- and then burns them down!
"Ghost Rider," featuring longtime fanboy Nicolas Cage -- all leathered up and skull a-blazin' -- finally hits screens this week. To keep this hog-riding hellraiser company in his eternal quest for payback, here's a gang of ultra-vengeful souls out to claim an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
A Death in the Family
"The Limey" (1999)
Provocation: A Cockney ex-con, Wilson (Terence Stamp), learns that the beloved daughter
he hasn't seen in nine years has died in a mysterious car crash. As Wilson's
quest for vengeance folds backward and forward in time and memory, our portrait
of Jenny looks less like a real woman than an existential pinup used to generate
"golden moments" for hollow men sucked dry of hope -- her dad as much as
Valentine (Peter Fonda), the lover who murdered her.
Payback: His face a beautiful death mask of corrosive
memories and cocked-pistol rage, black-clad Wilson personifies cool. Disarmed,
beaten up and tossed out on concrete by a bunch of low-life drug dealers, he
rises matter-of-factly to tug another gun out of his waistband and walk back
into the warehouse. Left outside, we hear gunfire and terrible screams, then
cheer as the baddest old guy on the block emerges. When a good woman (Lesley Ann Warren) offers her warm embrace,
Wilson's already in bed with death. Aiming to nail Valentine, he might as well
be snuffing himself -- a father who taught his child to love empty, dangerous
men.
"Mad Max" (1979)
Provocation: In some postapocalyptic future, a half-feral biker
gang -- headed by the grotesque "Toecutter" -- rules the roads Down Under.
Avenging the fiery death of one of their own, the crazies burn Max's best
friend, a brother cop, alive. Reprisals escalate, until Mrs. Max and little Max
Jr. are mowed down by a phalanx of motorcycles running full throttle -- her
sandal and a kid's ball flying across the asphalt a measure of horrific impact.
Payback: Boyish face blasted, Mel Gibson's road-warrior-to-be slams his
nitro-fueled muscle car flat into an oncoming wave of cycles. Death on wheels,
Mad Max dogs Toecutter into splatting himself all over the front of an oncoming
tractor trailer. He then traps the last of the savages in a gas-drenched wreck,
with the punk's only escape to amputate his own foot (shades of "Saw"!). Souped-up with pure kinetic energy and
ultra-violence, "Mad Max" red-lines its way to revenge, mapping a world that
ends not with a whimper or a bang, but maximum backfire.
Avenging Angels
"Kill Bill, Volume 1"
(2003); "Kill Bill, Volume 2"
(2004)
Provocation: Master assassin Bill (David Carradine), his lethal "daughters" (Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu) and brother Budd (Michael Madsen) massacre a wedding party, leaving
pregnant bride Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman), Bill's one-time favorite, for dead.
Payback: From Volume 1's tour-de-force bungalow battle,
climaxing with a wide-eyed tot witnessing her mom's death ("If you still feel
raw about it when you grow up, I'll be waiting"), to the Liebestod face-off at
the end of Volume 2, when Beatrix confronts her father-lover, "Kill Bill" is a
gorgeous, action-packed riff on "family" values and retribution. It's a Greek
tragedy by way of Quentin Tarantino's myth-, movie- and comic
book-fueled imagination. Beatrix's vengeance-trail twists and turns through
genre (chop-socky, spaghetti-Western, blaxploitation, etc.) and style, and
"samples" from films as diverse as "The Searchers" and "Lady Snowblood." Elegantly long-limbed, graceful
as a cat; cheekbones gaunted by coma, fury, terrible loss; often unrecognizable
under layers of dirt and blood, Thurman's many-times-resurrected Bride pursues
primal payback.
"Lady Snowblood" aka
"Shurayukihime" (1973)
Provocation: One sunny day, a schoolteacher
and his picture-perfect family, on their way to a new posting, are accosted by
leering thugs. After slicing and dicing father and son, they drag mommy off for
a prolonged bout of gang-rape.
Payback: Blood-red snow
falls outside a dank prison, as the dying teacher's wife delivers a baby girl
she's bedded every guard and convict to get. "Born for vengeance" and brutally
groomed as master swordfighter (the weapon's secreted in her parasol), Yuki
grows up a porcelain beauty, perfectly coiffed and kimonoed. Mincing delicately
down a dark, snowy lane, she ambushes a bad guy who asks his improbable
executioner's name. "Revenge," snaps Lady Snowblood. Amid super-saturated color
and lush design, backed by her doleful theme song ("...immersed in a river of
vengeance, I've thrown my womanhood away many moons ago"), this lovely Fury
looses literal fountains of blood as she settles scores with those who destroyed
her family before she was born.
Ghost Riders
"High Plains Drifter"
(1973)
Provocation: The venal vermin who populate a picturesque
lakeside town fail to lift a finger -- even savoring the show -- when a trio of
outlaws flog their marshal to bloody pulp.
Payback:
Emerging from shimmering waves of heat, a wavery silhouette slowly firms up into
a dark, frock-coated rider on a pale horse -- Sergio Leone's Man with No
Name (Clint Eastwood), with a vengeance. The town of
Lago's craven motto may be "Forgive and Forget," but the dead-eyed gunman they
buy with "anything in town you want" doesn't rest in that kind of peace. Helping
himself to the best Lago has to offer (women, saddle, boots, whiskey and
cigars), ice-cold Eastwood damns almost every citizen, paints the town red (with
paint and blood), changes Lago's name to "Hell" -- then melts back into the heat
waves from which he came.
"Point Blank"
(1967)
Provocation: Old buddy Reese (John Vernon)
uses their friendship to enlist a reluctant Walker's (Lee Marvin) help in an
Alcatraz heist, then pumps Walker full of bullets, stealing his wife and the
money.
Payback: After the Alcatraz double-cross, Walker
rises from the bottom of the screen like a re-animated zombie, an unaffected
iceman with snow-white hair. Zig-zagging his tortuous way toward Reese and
payback, Walker's memory and sense of time shift like quicksilver -- is "Point
Blank" a dying man's fantasy, or random slides stuttering through a corpse's
brain? After using a woman (Angie Dickinson) who loves him as sexual bait to
trap Reese, Walker kisses her off, just another stepping-stone in his obsessive
quest to find out "who runs things" -- does he mean the mysterious
Organization's top man? God? This sunny neo-noir goes nowhere, existentially
speaking, but you can't beat the scenery along the way.
Rape Revenge
"I'll Sleep When I'm Dead"
(2003)
Provocation: A young stud, all strut and charm, sells drugs
to partying debutantes, beds a blonde, then decides to call it a night. On the
way home, two bullyboys drag Davey (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) off the street to be
brutally buggered by their boss (Malcolm McDowell). Afterward, the defiled boy sits
-- fully dressed -- in his bathtub for many hours, then cuts his throat.
Payback: A onetime crime lord who cracked up and turned
bearded recluse living out of a van, Davey's older brother, Will (Clive Owen), looks like a mad wolf, even after
he's groomed and Armani'd. Driving his Jag through a city of perpetual night
smeared with molten gold reflections, Will revisits old haunts and methodically
tracks down Davey's rich-guy rapist. The arrogant creep confesses he meant to
teach his victim an existential lesson: "He was so sure of himself ... I wanted
to show him what he was: nothing, less than nothing." "I'll Sleep" ends on the
cold, gray beach where it began, with Will watching a solitary figure firing
golf balls into the ocean, and wondering "what's left to say [Davey] was here at
all?"
The film's British director, Mike Hodges, also helmed "Get Carter" (1971), a superb revenge saga about a stone-cold hit man (Michael Caine) who exacts nasty retribution for his brother's murder and his niece's slide into porn reels. "Get Carter" offers no relief from the emptiness and ugliness of Caine's underworld, where the cycle of kill and be killed continues without any end in sight.
"Ms. 45" (1981)
Provocation: Viciously raped in a garbage-strewn alley by a thug in
a terrifying mask, a shy, dowdy presser in New York's Garment District is hardly
home before she's assaulted again, this time by a burglar.
Payback: Something short-circuits big-time, and the mute
mouse crushes the second rapist's skull, cuts him up in her bathtub and drops
his bagged remains in trashcans all over town. Suddenly, this voiceless victim's
transformed: Garishly made-up, hooded and caped, swathed in a black dress slit
up to heaven, armed with a .45, she's Death as Dreamgirl, nemesis of every
horndog who comes on to her. The cruel irony here is that it takes rape and
retribution to trigger an arrested child into aggressive, if perverted,
adulthood.
Clint Eastwood's "Sudden Impact" (1983) is also worth a look-see: a woman (Sondra Locke) and her kid sister are gang-raped while a nutcase lesbo eggs the boys on. Little sister goes permanently comatose, leaving big sister to take revenge by providing the perps with ".45 caliber vasectomies." Eastwood's Dirty Harry finds a soulmate in this fragile-blonde vigilante, who ruthlessly metes out justice without benefit of law.
Shakespearean Gore
"Titus" (1999)
Provocation: Freshly home from war, Titus Andronicus (Anthony Hopkins), a Roman general with an
overdeveloped sense of patriotism, sacrifices one of the captured Goth queen's
three sons, despite Tamora's pleas for mercy.
Payback: One
of Shakespeare's lesser plays, "Titus Andronicus" is a theatrical meat-grinder
designed to pulverize its hero for a tragic flaw that's really an excess of
virtue. In Julie Taymor's anachronistic mishmash, Rome looks half-historical,
half Third Reich wet dream. Costumes run from sexy gold breastplates and
barbarian furs to fascist uniforms and glam-rock duds. When a lascivious emperor
(Alan Cumming) becomes gorgeous Tamora's sex slave,
cruel revenge is hatched by the queen (Jessica Lange), her black lover and her bad seed.
First, the Goth punks rape and mutilate Titus' virginal daughter. In a genuinely
horrific image, the traumatized, half-naked girl wavers on a tree stump, her
tongue cut out, black twigs spread where hands once were. Then Titus is tricked
into chopping off his own hand to save two of his three surviving sons, only to
have their heads delivered -- like gory take-out -- to his door. This orgy of
dismemberment finally(!) drives Titus around the bend: Turning Hannibal Lecter
in chef's hat, he serves the barbarous queen her sons -- in piping-hot meat
pies. Tasty!
What is your favorite tale of revenge? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com
In addition to her regular contributions to MSN Movies, Kathleen Murphy reviews films for Seattle's Queen Anne News and writes essays on film for Steadycam magazine. A frequent speaker on film, Murphy has contributed numerous essays to magazines (Film Comment, the Village Voice, Film West, Newsweek-Japan), books ("Best American Movie Writing of 1998," "Women and Cinema," "The Myth of the West") and Web sites (Amazon.com, Cinemania.com, Reel.com). Once upon a time, in another life, she wrote speeches for Bill Clinton, Jack Lemmon, Harrison Ford, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Art Garfunkel and Diana Ross.
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