"I am going to kill you, and then I'm going to defile your corpse."
One of the major differences between the exploitation films of the 1970s and what passes for exploitation cinema today is that such sentences appear in the scripts of the latter as dialogue and in the former as stage directions ("Jonah kills Piper and defiles her corpse"). When Jonah says these words in Drive Angry, the audience recognizes that the threat is an idle one. In the exploitation films of the 70s such dialogue is unnecessary because the individual to whom these words would have been spoken has already been shot and the person who would have spoken them is already balls-deep in the bullet hole.
August 7, 2011
Piranha (2010) vs Drive Angry (2011)
If you read this blog with any regularity, you're likely to "hear" me complain over and over about how tame and inauthentic today's movies are. Going into a film, there's an increasingly large number of things the viewer is aware he or she won't see, and in addition to making movie plots much more predictable and formulaic, this growing trend toward cinematic puritanism drives filmmakers to compensate for what they can't show with ever-greater excess in what they can. The result is stuff like torture porn, which is over-the-top in its depictions of gore but safe because the viewer is aware of just how far it will go.
Still, despite today's exploitation-type films' marked inferiority to their thematic predecessors, they often contain enough exploitation elements or gimmickry that they're enjoyable in parts if not as a whole. Rarely does one find such a film truly unsettling or disgusting or offensive, but one might delight in the sheer volume of blood being shed or the unusually high (unusual for recent years, anyway) amount of bare ass on display. Piranha and Drive Angry are two such films. Neither is a masterpiece, but both are entertaining to some degree.
The filmmakers of today's neo-exploitation movement (Eli Roth, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez -- and don't get me wrong, I love Rodriguez, and I usually like Tarantino) are more interested in outclevering one another with inventive ways of hacking off limbs or perforating torsos with bullets ("you know, havin' fun with it and shit like that") than they are in anything else. Alexandre Aja saw a remake of 1978's Piranha as an opportunity to first fill the screen with naked or mostly naked college girls and then to fill Lake Havasu with their naked or mostly naked body parts. Could any filmmaker with a background in torture porn resist that?
Piranha's characters are all loathsome, but that's all right because the very reason you're watching the film is so you can see them either without clothes or without skin, preferably both (but not at the same time).
The plot is pretty stupid, but that's okay because there's one scene in which a guy's penis gets severed during a piranha attack and the fish are so busy fighting over how to divide the rest of him that this prime delicacy sinks unnoticed toward the bottom of the lake. The camera opts to follow the shriveled bit of flesh as it descends into the depths (because we've already seen about thirty other bodies get skeletonized), and so we watch it flutter about in the small currents produced by passing piranhas until one of the fish sees the missed morsel and consumes it.
Piranha's soundtrack is horrible, and apparently Ving Rhames's character recognizes this because, rather than getting out of the water when a school of the piscine predators arrives and begins eating its way through the spring break festivities, he opts to drown out the music by ripping the outboard motor off a boat and filleting the little suckers with its propeller.
Drive Angry is a revenge flick about a man named Milton (Nicolas Cage) who escapes from Hell in order to avenge his murdered daughter and rescue his infant granddaughter from a Satan-worshiping cult that plans to sacrifice her on the next full moon. With the help of Piper (Amber Heard), an ex-waitress who "talks tough and looks like she can fuck like a bunny," Milton carves a path of carnage through Colorado, Oklahoma, and into Louisiana, where the cult has headquartered itself on the grounds of an abandoned prison.
How does Milton escape Hell? It's not really important, but it's too ludicrous to leave out. He does so by stealing a projectile weapon called the "godkiller." If you're shot by the godkiller, you cease to exist. You don't go to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory; you simply vanish. One would think that those who've been damned to Hell would prefer an eternity of non-existence to one of suffering, but the godkiller is a weapon that everyone dreads (anyway, Hell doesn't seem like such a bad place in this movie, and Satan is a reasonable, socially conscious sort who doesn't condone the abduction and murder of children in his name). Absurd, yes, but if you buy into all the other Christian mythology you shouldn't find this too implausible.
As neo-exploitation films go, Drive Angry isn't bad. You've got car chases, exploding body parts, and naked women shooting guns. In one scene, Milton is in a motel room having sex with the woman who served him his beer in the motel's restaurant/bar thirty minutes prior. He's fully clothed, she's fully unclothed, and twenty or thirty armed cult members (these are, of course, in endless supply in southern states) are getting organized outside. When the assault is launched (and somehow these guys seem to be coming from every direction even though every cheap motel room I've ever stayed in has had only one door and one window), Milton is expecting it. Without removing the cigar from his mouth or his penis from his companion's vagina, he reaches for his gun with the hand that isn't holding a beer and then proceeds to decorate the walls of the motel room with blood, brain tissue, and bullet holes, all without spilling a drop or mistiming a thrust. After he finishes unloading on his attackers with one type of gun, he unloads into the barmaid with another, stands up, zips up, grabs Piper, whose timely arrival on the scene allowed her to bludgeon the last of the baddies after Milton ran out of ammo, and they run from the room together.
Overall, Drive Angry is a much better film than Piranha. It's more consistently fun and less consistently obnoxious. Piranha skimps on the nudity and overdoes the gore. Drive Angry is more balanced. Both films are worth seeing if you have a couple spare hours that you'd otherwise spend braiding your pubic hair, but only Drive Angry is worth watching more than once.
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