Behind the Couch

2009 Dir. Tiwa Moeithaisong Troubled Buss (Mai Charoenpura) struggles to make ends meet and pay off her absent husband’s debts, selling noodle soup from her food cart. One day she is caught in the midst of a student riot and dragged to safety by activist Attapol, with whom she begins a tentative relationship. Buss later discovers the body of one of the rioters in her food cart and decides to cook it, adding the meat to her noodle soup. Before long, her business becomes very successful, meaning she must find a steady supply of fresh human meat to use in her cooking… Heavily marketed as the latest Thai ‘torture-porn’ export, Meat Grinder wears its promise of gut-wrenching gore and sadistic scenes of violence rather proudly. And so it should, for they are amongst the most startling and insistent scenes of carnage in recent memory. The opening monochromatic montage depicts a woman calmly preparing a human cadaver for cooking, smearing it with herbs and spices and marinating it befor...

'Your hand, your tongue, Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under 't.' - Lady Macbeth 'Appearances are deceptive.' - Aesop One of cinema's most compelling stock characters is the ‘femme fatale’ – a complex, seductive and dangerous woman whose cunning can sometimes belie her need for justice or vengeance, her rage, or a wounded heart, or sometimes just demonstrate her bitter cruelty. Less often, her motives were completely concealed from the viewer. She ensnares her lovers through sexual conquest, often leading them into compromising and deadly situations. ‘Femme fatale’ is French for ‘deadly woman’. Quite often these women were portrayed as somehow wronged and whose vengeance decimates all those who have wronged them. An archetypal character of literature, cinema and even art, the femme fatale is most frequently associated with Film Noir. Film Noir is a cinematic term used to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas – extremely popular th...

2007 Dir. Mitchell Lichtenstein The idea of the ‘vagina dentata’ (Latin for 'toothed vagina') exists in many cultures and world mythologies, and is generally thought to stem from cautionary folk tales warning men of the consequences of rape. It is an idea very much connected to female empowerment. While various horror and rape-revenge films such as  I Spit on your Grave ,  Last House on the Left  and  Ms 45  have featured avenging women castrators who defiantly make a stand against aggressive, toxic masculinity, Teeth goes one step further and explores this concept in a very  literal sense. That it does so with such pitch black humour and barbed social commentary really adds to the enjoyment and effectiveness. Dawn O’Keefe is a young woman who, like many young people in Bible-belt America, has pledged an allegiance to God to abstain from sex until she's married. Its in this context that the film has its edge, taking satirical jabs at the oppressive...