Not really “stupid”, but I didn’t know where to post this other than the movies thread but it seemed more suited for PWI:
This was the 80s. Roger Ebert was a dude who was anti-censorship no matter how much he despised the material and he did contribute to, and even wrote scripts for “satirical” exploitation movies prior to this. Roeper was just a big wuss when it comes to movie violence.
The jist of it is that all the slasher flicks in the 80s to early 90s after Halloween were “anti-female”.
What they’re saying is that while John Carpenter’s Halloween put the viewer in the place of the victim to terrify the viewer, all the ones trying to cash in on the “slasher formula” extracted the wrong shit from it and went in the opposite direction by putting the viewer in the place of the slasher.
They use a lot of the Friday the 13th movies as examples since it contains lots of shots of Jason stalking people from his POV with the funny breathing noises and all.
To put this in context, which isn’t mentioned in their reviews, Halloween was the first major horror movie that had minimal blood and gore in it after that shit became the norm in horror movies in the mid 60s and throughout the 70s (Bloodfeast, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead, Italian giallos) and dudes who wanted their horror fixes could now bring their dates along because it now also appealed to chicks like Richard Roeper who couldn’t stand watching such gore.
It’s something like the more modern wave of horror movies that started from The Ring that are really just chick flicks in disguise (The Japanese versions, at least) IMHO. No gore. No violence. Mostly JUMP SCARES! with few to no physical consequences to the victim. Single mother dealing with shit that may or may not be just in her head. Sound familiar?
If you watch the video, what they’re saying sounds a lot like the feminist stuff being said nowadays.
They come to the conclusion that the slasher flicks of that era was a pushback against the feminist movement and served mainly as mediums for catharsis for disenfranchised males by using the aforementioned style of putting the viewer in the place of the slasher.
Any time a woman decides to venture out of the kitchen to do independent woman shit, she gets killed.
Chick undresses at the start of the movie for no reason other than to show us boobs. Dead.
Chick has pre-marital sex. Dead.
Chick decides to do have a meaningful vocation like a summer camp counselor. Dead.
Chick asserts authority by talking back to men. Dead.
Chick decides to do something adventurous like travel and hitchhike. Dead.
Prostitute. Dead. Violently killed. Burning(The Burning), scalping(Maniac), electrocution etc.
All depicted with voyeuristic shots prior to the kills.
Who survives - a.k.a The Final Girl - according to the Gospel of Scream? The VIRGIN.
What’s the purported message? Keep your legs closed until you’re married and then stay in the kitchen and you’ll be fine.
Then, later, Ebert starts ranting about growing nihilism when the movies started offing both men and women at similar rates, which was the direction John Carpenter, director of the movie that started all this shit in the first place, went into in his later movies(the nihilist shit, not the killcount) like They Live (I’m here to kick ass and chew bubble gum yadda yadda yadda) and Escape from New York.
He called it all “despicable”, berating a later instalment of Friday the 13th for telling teens that there’s no real meaning to anything you decide to do in life since you’re probably going to get killed anyway and all you can really hope for is Tom Savini being involved in the makeup department so your death looks cool. Ok I added the last one in myself.
Seriously, is all the shit we are reading and hearing TODAY really new? It looks like it already went full circle and just had a revival but with more people making noise because we now have social media and lots of YouTubers who do nothing but analyse this shit.
Btw, I’ve never watched a single Friday the 13th movie in full prior to Jason Goes to Hell, which was made in the 90s, because they bored the fuck out of me so don’t give me any shit about them.
But I’ll admit to enjoying watching really bad, violent movies even to the point of pure schlock because they’re so bad they end turning into something that inevitably resulted from a natural progression of slapstick comedies. Don’t give me shit for liking them either. We have the real, legit shit now with the John Wick movies. Anyone who likes them shares the same kind of guilty pleasures as me.