Daily Nebraskan

Issue date: 10/31/06 Section: Opinion

John "Hellblood" Wenz / Senior English major

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of watching a 20-minute castration scene. I can thank David Slade's "Hard Candy" for this.

The movie revolves around a young girl, played by Ellen Page, who turns the tables on an online predator, played by Patrick Wilson.

It starts with a simple meeting, with Page going to Wilson's house.

But before you know it, Wilson is tied up and Page is looking for the evidence to convict him.

But when she finds a picture of an Amber Alert girl, it devolves even further into a sadistic torture, both mental and physical.

And the castration scene isn't even the end of it.

The movie is unflinching and unrelenting. In fact, much of the genuine terror isn't from gore - which aside from a little blood is all but minimal - but from the tension between the main characters, which reaches its breaking point many times and keeps coming back for more.

"Hard Candy" is one in a small line of woman-scorned movies, a subgenre in suspense and horror, and with good reason: It's hard to pull off right, and it's hard to watch if they do.

This particular movie works well within the genre, however. In fact, while watching it I couldn't help but be reminded of the debatable "classic" of the woman-scorned flicks, "I Spit on Your Grave."

In that 1978 Meir Zarchi movie, a confident, empowered woman moves into a cabin to pen her next novel. However, the hicks in the surrounding community don't take well to her uppity-ness, and they proceed to break into her house and gang rape her.

The gang rape scene is unnecessarily wrong and archly excruciating, without a doubt. But it's the latter half of the film that makes it a classic.

In this, the woman, played by Camille Keaton, rises from the "grave" after her assailants thought they had killed her. And, understandably, she is pissed.

Rather than cowering from her attack, she hunts each of them down one by one and calculatingly kills them.

These scenes are gruesome and excruciating. It includes a castration scene in which a man is stabbed in his testicles during a "sex" scene in the tub and gets a boat propeller to the face.

But the four assailants get theirs in the end, just as there is an ultimate cruel justice to "Hard Candy."

"I Spit on Your Grave" came on the heels of second wave feminism, and it had the exacting revenge against male assailants that both typified and defined the notions associated with it.

Continued...

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