Category — *Horror/Thrillers

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is another visual masterpiece from Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola, but like its predecessor it falls down when in comes to its female characters.

In the first film, Liz Sherman’s role as a dangerous, …

Okay, I love(d)* Supernatural. I acknowledge that I tend to filter out a lot with it because of that love. The show’s about two brothers, Dean and Sam Winchester, who hunt evil. This has pretty much always been their life. …

In 2002, Fatal Attraction was loosely remade into Swimfan. The cheating husband, Dan, becomes devoted boyfriend Ben, to girlfriend Amy (reincarnated from Dan’s wife Beth.) The woman - although more of a girl - he cheated with becomes Madison (Erika …

About ten years ago, I first saw Fatal Attraction. Even then, in my mid-teens and a burgeoning feminist, the movie annoyed me. I saw it again recently, and pinpointed exactly what I didn’t like about it.
You have Dan (Michael Douglas) …

When seeing horror movies, I’m usually the one sitting in the back who’s been coerced by her mates to come, giving a running commentary about how lame this movie is. And here some random female gets slashed up; here the …

Saw The Fly recently, and was pleasantly surprised to see a fairly strong female character in a horror flick. The film revolves around Seth (Jeff Goldblum), a scientist who is working on teleportation. He becomes involved with Ronnie (Geena Davis) …

Spoilers below. Triggers: child molestation.

Surprisingly, Selena St. George may be the least sympathetic female character in Dolores Claiborne even though she’s the victim upon whom the story’s events center. Fictional female abuse victims written by people who either don’t have …

Spoilers below.

While Dolores has an understandable reason for killing her husband, Vera Donovan is a different story. She killed her husband because he regularly committed adultery and ignored Vera completely when she tried her utmost to win his affection through …

Spoilers below. Triggers: mentions of child molestation.

The first aspect of Dolores Claiborne I want to talk about is its raw demonstration of what it’s like to be a woman abused by a husband. Joe is far from a criminal mastermind, …

“Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.”– said with slight variations by Dolores, Selena and Vera.
Dolores Claiborne is Taylor Hackford’s faithful adaptation of a Stephen King novel about a woman who may have murdered her husband and gotten away with it. That summary hardly touches this complex story, though.

This is one of the few perfect movies to show to someone who wonders why women stay in abusive relationships or why women don’t stand up to their abusers, or who assumes there’s always a lawful solution to dealing with abuse.

This is a story about what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s world: a world that is literally owned and designed by and for men. Throughout the story, Dolores is advised to keep her voice down, to stop smarting off to the men in charge, to control her temper. The irony is that perhaps if anyone had ever said anything like that to her husband, none of this would have happened.

This post is the first installment in a series on what I consider to be the best motion picture ever made. The more I analyze it, the more I find to talk about, like one of those nested Russian matryoshka dolls, the outer figure resembling Dolores, the final inner figure representing her daughter, Selena. In order to dig down from Dolores’ story to Selena’s, I have to begin with a chronological synopsis of the events below the More tag.

Spoilers follow. Triggers: mentions of domestic abuse and child molestation.