Strange Days: Before The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty —the latter of which I consider overrated— Kathryn Bigelow was great for two things: Near Dark, still one of the better vampire movies ever made, and Strange Days, one of Ralph Fiennes rare attempts to be a Real Movie Star. But for the purposes of this list, SD is significant because it contains a hot/disturbing scene where an intruder breaks into a woman’s apartment, subdues her, strips her, and puts a sci-fi sensor thing on her head that allows her to see and feel everything he’s experiencing… then he strangles her. So she dies, naked in her bathroom, unable to see or feel anything but the sight of herself struggling and the feeling of his satisfaction.
Irreversible: Duh. I doubt most English-speakers have watched the film in its entirety… everyone just jumps to Monica Bellucci, who sells her rape scene harder than anyone in the history of cinema.
Compliance: The whole movie is the build-up to a hot scene, so I can’t describe it without spoilage. Suffice to say, it’s about intimidation, manipulation, passivity in the face of authority, and Dreama Walker’s wide-eyed vulnerability.
Stoker: An uncle and his niece playing piano can be… quite something.
Fast Times At Ridgemont High: Not the Phoebe Cates parts. No no no. Jennifer Jason “I’m a victim or a victimizer in every movie” Leigh is the focus of attention here. And the scene in question isn’t even a big deal… that’s why it was so hot to me at the time, even as a teenager myself. The sweet, innocent, high-achieving virgin gets her furrow plowed by a disinterested piece of shit who doesn’t care anything about her and immediately discards her, thus crushing her dreams and leaving her to feel all the more alone when the pregnancy test comes back positive. It’s so… normal. So mundane. But that genius actor made me feel her character’s excitement and shame and regret so viscerally that it taught me to spot the small tragedies around me. I know it doesn’t sound like I’m describing something I find “hot”, although I assure you, I masturbated to it when I was fourteen. But JJL and Amy Heckerling did two interestingly opposing things to my brain: they awakened me to the personhood of girls, and yet made callously using a girl look pretty damned satisfying for a man. Fortunately I focused on the former message and buried the latter until I was deep into adulthood and capable of weighing the cost of my amusement.
Mullholland Dr.: Naomi Watts, legs spread, eyes crazed, makeup running, hair disheveled, desperately edging to a fantasy that’s maybe a reality or maybe both and neither. It’s brief, but damn… Naomi had clearly done her research.
Blue Velvet: Everything about Isabella Rossellini’s character, and everything that happens to her. Also, I identified with the character of Jeffrey Beaumont more than most Lynch characters… as I expect Lynch does himself.
Sucker Punch: Zack Snyder is a one-trick pony. And Sucker Punch isn’t deep. But he and the camera spend a couple hours making mad, passionate love to every sad nuance on Emily Browning’s perfect little doll face, and it is always watchable.
I’m going to pause this here. I reserve the option to return with supplementary material at a later time.
I’ve definitely seen it. Glowbug and I tried to watch it last year, before Plex gained proper Watch Together support, and had to give up about fifteen minutes in… stream-syncing got a lot better, very quickly after COVID-19 came to town.
Anyway… I first saw Flesh+Blood when it was called The Rose and the Sword on VHS, and it is indeed ripe for inclusion in this list. Within the first ten minutes, you’ve got random wenches and nuns (!) being raped by wild-eyed men covered in blood and mud, and eventually, you have Jennifer Jason Leigh’s pert young princess being raped over and over as she revels in her abuse and falls in love with her captor, Rutger Hauer.
It’s a very ‘80s production, with lots of the dialog looped so that scenes shot on location sound like they were recorded in a sound booth, and Verhoeven was never one for subtlety even at the height of his powers, but still… based on the sheer volume of sexual violence and blasphemy, and the glee with which it’s presented, F+B is a rather remarkable film.