My guess is Zack Snyder is a pretty kinky dude.
300 and Watchmen were dripping with over-the-top sexuality and you know somewhere on the cutting room floor of Legend of the Guardians is a steamy owl mating scene, but it wasn’t until the trailer for Sucker Punch collectively melted our brains with sensory overload that we realized Snyder was into some crazy, whacked out stuff.
School girls, burlesque dancing, samurai Swords, copious amounts of leather – was this a Hollywood blockbuster or a feature-length Suicide Girls video?
Few people have seen the finished film, but if anything is to be assumed, it’s that Snyder made the movie he wanted to make – and that’s cool. That abashed commitment to personal taste makes Sucker Punch unique…and, perhaps, borderline fetishistic.
Here are seven other films that we imagine were crafted with that same burning, unconventional passion:
Barb Wire
Whether Pamela Anderson’s Barb Wire set women’s lib back a hundred years or stands as one of the most progressive films of the ’90s is still up in the air, but most critics agreed: the film was a stinker. But maybe not for the right reasons – Roger Ebert complains in his original review that “Barb Wire’s breasts, winched into place and clamped down by leather and steel costumes, seem as immobile as the similarly shaped fenders on a 1957 Olds Rocket 88.”
That’s right – giving the movie two and a half stars, Ebert thought Barb Wire could have a been a little more like porn, as opposed to the campy, Maxim-style action flick it turned out to be.
Kill Bill Vol. 1
Quentin Tarantino’s obsessed with a few things in this world: movies, Uma Thurman, shocking violence and feet. Kill Bill Vol. 1 is the culmination of that love, a pouring out of the heart onto celluloid. Film scholars will be studying Tarantino’s cinematic references in Kill Bill for ages and few female characters will ever match the alluring badassery of Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo. But the director’s strongest preoccupations come to surface when The Bride revives herself from a coma, first biting out an orderly’s tongue, killing him in a gush of bloody glory, then proceeding to “wake her feet up,” a prolonged sequence of foot fetish-style toe-wiggling.
Few things seem more appropriate to do when stuck in a vehicle called the “Pussy Wagon.”
The Matrix
Movies have found a way over the years to turn gunplay into sexy, dangerous modern dance. The sounds, the movement, the rhythm – in the right hands, violence can be easily transformed into seductive art. No one knows this better than The Wachowski Bros., who took a page out of Anime’s book to bring The Matrix’s slow-motion battles to life. These guys loooove guns and the mess of bullets they ejaculate. The final lobby shoot out is down right gratuitous, like a slick commercial selling you on rapid fire weaponry. Has Apple come out with the iRifle yet? There’s a duo that could shoot that ad.
Catwoman
Michelle Pfeiffer’s skin-tight suit and razor-sharp claws in Batman Returns continue to be the object of much affection, but it’s Halle Berry’s Catwoman garb that catapulted the character from seductively ferocious burglar to porn star reject. The updated suit, with its cat-ear mask, bikini top, torn-up leather pants and stilettos, looks like a discount costume they’d sell at a sex dungeon gift shop. Director Pitof dressed Berry in the S&M-lite costume and pit her against another sex icon, Sharon Stone, making for some particularly feisty cat fights (pun!).
Zardoz
Women aren’t the only people fetishized is movies. Take John Boorman’s Zardoz, a trippy sci-fi starring Sean Connery running around in a red jock strap gunning down people with a revolver. A bit of a departure from James Bond.
Connery’s Zed lives in a world controlled by a giant head. No biggie…that is, until he enters its mouth and runs into two beautiful, psychic women who turn him into their slave. Zardoz makes about as much sense as that Greek Mythology segment of Fantasia (read: very little) and features production value on par with Deep Throat. Films don’t get much more kitschy than that.
Bloodrayne
You may not like his films (heck, you may detest his films), but Uwe Boll doesn’t pander. Thanks to his showmanship and access to Nazi gold, Boll has been steadily churning out low-class films whose quality can only be attributed to his own low-class nature. You don’t make a movie like Postal unless you want people to hate you. In Bloodrayne, Boll lets loose his tension in the form of bizarre vampiric lovemaking and violence. By the time Meatloaf shows up surrounded by his nude, blood-covered harem, you imagine the movie was only made so Boll could watch it on repeat when it went straight to DVD.
The Notebook
Nick Cassavetes’s romantic drama is engineered to make you weep. There’s a pattern: one minute, the couple is basking in romance. The next, something horrible happens. But then something else nice! But then something terrible! But maybe there’s hope! But maybe there’s not.
If the previous filmmakers have indulged and painted with their deep-seeded love for sex and violence, then Cassavetes crafted a true pornography cemented with sadness. Whether it’s an uplifting or heartbreaking moment, the tears never stop flowing in The Notebook.
Strap yourself in and on, and read more scintillating lists
