Word: slasher
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SEEN the ads for The Hitcher on TV or the trailers at the movies, you know that the only real question facing a potential audience member is whether The Hitcher is a "good" B-rate flick or a "bad" B-rate flick. Another slasher film could have taken the urban legend style, Riders on the Storm hitchiker killer motif and made a palatable product for the sanguinary tastes of the nation's youth. But though its premise is good, The Hitcher fails to deliver, and the audience is tediously dragged over the desert highways of this misdesigned film...
Moviegoers don't get many chances to cry together in public these days. The local picture house is a place for belly laughs and slasher screams; for a cathartic sob one must go to TV for a Movie of the Week or a late show. Once in a while, though, a film will buck the glut of exploitation movies and attract any viewer who still carries a hankie. Critic Raymond Durgnat called them "male weepies": films to make a grown man, or a baby mogul, cry. They describe a heroic life struggle that may end in defeat or death...
...ARGENT. In his most serene and terrifying parable in a 50-year career, French Film Master Robert Bresson cauterizes modern France as a society built and run on counterfeit values. The moral of this metaphysical slasher movie: greed kills...
...often unleash on women. Aroused or desensitized by images of erotic domination, the argument goes, men may follow the examples set onscreen. Thus movies containing scenes of sexual violence are criminal violations-if not of the obscenity statutes, then of women's civil rights. And this applies to slasher movies like Friday the 13th and art-house hits like Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away as well as to heterosexual hard core. (Gay porn, in which men victimize men, would not be affected.) En garde! Out of the furnace of feminism springs a righteous protectionism that strikes with vigilante...
...realm of today's performing arts, energy is an overvalued coin. Its name is invoked to trumpet every gonadal excess from heavy metal to slasher movies...