Word: guignols
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Those early films boasted a luxurious imagination and a talent for creating spooky or gory effects on minuscule budgets. Bad Taste, with the first-time director in a lead role, had aliens hunting down humans for their fast-food value--gourmet Guignol. Meet the Feebles was, we're pretty sure, the first all-puppet musical-comedy splatter film. The hero of Braindead (also known as Dead Alive) was sucked into the reproductive organs of his 20-ft.-tall zombie monster mom (a puppet), then fought his way out again. Only Heavenly Creatures, a rapturous, true-life study of teen obsession...
...snarls, rages at her husband, expounds a boozy philosophy, talks baby talk, goes off to the kitchen to seduce a casual visitor, and turns in a performance that stains the memory but stays there. The play is Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a psychological Grand Guignol set in the academic world ... With auburn hair, a strong frame and a forbiddingly experienced face, Uta Hagen has the physical force to play Albee's tough, bitter, foul-mouthed woman ... She thinks that teaching [at HB Studio] helps to stabilize her performances and give her objectivity...
...That?s Grand as in Guignol. Subway Cinema?s last big series, ?Asian Films Are Go!!!?, featured a couple of hard-edged sex-and-violence Japanese entries. This time, though, nearly every movie is designed to leave a lump of revolt in your gut. Revolt and, if ITMFG gets to you, an aching premonition. For beyond the gore is the void. We are all facing death, these movies say, and when we smell its fetid breath we have only two choices. Laugh and fight, as Samo does. Or scream and fight, as Lily Chung does against her super-subhuman attacker...
Granted, the NFL has got pretty lame. But Vince! No fair catches? No touchbacks? That's it? That's what all the fuss is about? We, as a television audience, have been weaned on Grand Guignol reality programming--standard fare like World's Grimmest Third World Postcolonial Descents into Anarchy videos. We're talking about entire families whiling the night away on the couch, munching toffee popcorn, watching kidney transplants and sex-change operations. You want to give us more bang for the buck (i.e., more violence), you're gonna have to do a lot better. How do you decrease...