November 3rd, 2008
1. Fatal Attraction (1987)
"Don't you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not?" a spurned Cameron Diaz asks Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky, before taking an act of life-changing vengeance on him. Avenging-women movies often focus on righteous revenge for the raped and abused, but sometimes they're about the irrational acts of a woman who thinks an erstwhile lover has reneged on that unspoken body-promise. The modern era's best-known example is Fatal Attraction, Adrian Lyne's sleazy thriller about a husband and father (Michael Douglas) whose body makes a promise to Glenn Close that the rest of him has no intention of keeping. She isn't pleased, and when she retaliates, she brings the crazy in a number of memorable ways. In an era of rapidly increasing sexual freedom (and rapidly lowering social stigma for women who chose not to remain blushing virgins until the wedding day), Fatal Attraction sounded a shrill warning bell: That casual affair may cost you your family, social position, peace of mind, and pet bunny.
2. Medea (1987)
The Euripides tragedy Medea remains the touchstone for all cold-blooded female-revenge stories, so it seems appropriate that Lars von Trier, a Danish director known for putting women through the ringer in films like Breaking The Waves and Dancer In The Dark, would tackle the play in all its unrelenting bleakness. Working from a script co-written by his late countryman Carl Dreyer (The Passion Of Joan Of Arc)—with whom he claimed to communicate telepathically throughout the production—von Trier follows Medea (Kirsten Oleson), a wronged woman who takes a decidedly more active role in her fate than the women in his other films. After benefiting from her sorcery and black magic, her lover Jason (the adventurer of Argonauts fame) abandons her and their two sons for a politically advantageous marriage to the king's daughter. His betrayal triggers a response so outrageously disproportional to the crime that it remains shocking to this day.
3. Ms. 45 (1981)
Abel Ferrara's lurid thriller about a mute seamstress who "speaks" through violence could be called a feminist exploitation picture if it weren't such a contradiction in terms. The crude set-up finds Zoe Lund, a mute woman who gets raped twice in one day—once in an alley on the way home from work, again by a burglar in her apartment—taking matters into her own hands. After getting the upper hand on the second attacker, whom she kills in self-defense and whose remains she disposes of in a number of paper bags, Lund buys a gun and heads into the night. Though Ms. 45 is a rape-revenge story, the "revenge" part is disturbingly nebulous: She isn't out to kill any specific violator, just lecherous males in general. The spectacular finale, set at a Halloween party where Lund appears in a nun's habit, must be seen to be believed.
4. Lipstick (1976)
Margaux Hemingway was 22, and her sister Mariel was 14, when they both made their big-screen debuts in the 1976 thriller Lipstick. Infamous for its extended, almost casually brutal rape scene of Margeaux—and, thankfully, a less graphic one of Mariel—by an ice-veined Chris Sarandon (fresh off his Oscar-nominated turn in Dog Day Afternoon), Lipstick takes the bluntest way out imaginable. After being acquitted of assault on a technicality and ready to walk free, Sarandon is made to stare down the barrel of justice when Margaux, in a fit of android-like rage, chases him down in a parking lot in broad daylight, shotgun blazing. It's a hollow revenge, though, as Margaux surrenders what humanity she has left in order to become an executioner—and a sad one, in retrospect, since the troubled actress took her own life in a far quieter manner 20 years later.
5. Enough (2002)
In Enough, Jennifer Lopez doesn't play a mere woman scorned—she's a woman controlled, abused, and stalked by her cartoonishly psychopathic husband, who's fond of overexplaining his evil ways like an actual cartoon psychopath. "Love is a scary thing, how powerful it is, what it does to you," he reminds her, unnecessarily, after a beating. Lopez leaves with her daughter and a series of wigs and tries to hide, only to be found or intimidated by her husband or his band of thugs. She goes to a lawyer—just the one, but apparently he represents the entire legal system—but he tells her the law can't help her. Unable to hide, and unable to turn to the police because that one lawyer said so, Lopez turns to the only things left that can help her: Krav Maga, the Israeli martial arts; Vaseline, which she smears on her neck and face before the fight scene to prevent scratches; and a bevy of high-tech devices to assist her in jumping her estranged husband in his house in a big finale showdown. (Oh, also her wealthy estranged father named—no joke—Jupiter, who gives her money to start a new life.) Evidently the only way to stop a violent cartoonish psychopath is to become one.
6. Friday The 13th (1980)
The Friday The 13th series is so completely associated in the minds of moviegoers with the hockey-masked, machete-wielding maniac Jason Voorhees that it's easy to forget he wasn't the main villain until the second film. The first movie, which launched a thousand dismal slasher flicks, featured well-traveled B-actress Betsy Palmer as Mrs. Pamela Voorhees, an unassuming middle-aged cafeteria lady, and it was she who was punishing teenagers for doing what teenagers do. Her killing spree was triggered by the drowning death of her little boy Jason decades earlier, which happened because of the lifeguards' raging hormones. In a way, it's sad the franchise didn't stick with her as the antagonist: who wouldn't have enjoyed Freddy Vs. Jason's Mom, featuring Robert Englund dueling with a frumpy 77-year-old woman?
7. Sudden Impact (1983)
Shortly before their messy real-life split, Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke teamed up for the fourth installment of the Dirty Harry franchise. Locke co-stars as a woman who was gang-raped, along with her sister, in a sleepy California town. The trauma left Locke's sister in a vegetative state, so—years later, of course—Locke decides to track down all of the perpetrators and murder them. (Her mode, naturally, is to shoot them once in the genitals and once in the head.) At some point, Eastwood gets wise to her plan, but he beds her first. In the film's climactic final scene, Dirty Harry shoots the rapist, saves the girl, and allows the local lawmen to believe she had nothing to do with a string of brutal murders. Justice is served!
8. Extremities (1986)
"What she did to survive is nothing compared to what she'll do to get even." Whoa, that's a hell of a tagline, isn't it? In this 1986 film—adapted from William Mastrosimone's stage play—Farrah Fawcett escapes a serial rapist but leaves her wallet behind. The cops refuse to help, and naturally, the rapist shows up at her house, playing mind games and psychologically torturing her. But Fawcett is able to turn the tables with the help of some insect repellant and a table lamp—and then she faces a decision (along with her roommates, who eventually show up). Does she give the rapist the justice that she knows society won't, or does she call the cops? Either way, she's gonna mess with him for a while first.
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