Responding to criticism that a review of his had unfairly given information about the ending of a thriller, the late film critic Gene Siskel is said to have replied: "Here is the ending of every thriller ever made -- the bad guy dies." So when, in this week's Take Five, we talk about revenge thrillers, we're not talking about movies where some power-tool-wielding misogynist more or less accidentally gets it in the neck after two hours of tormenting co-eds and/or mapless vacationers. We're talking about movies like Xavier Gens' Frontiers, opening in limited and highly disgusting release this Friday; movies where evildoers show up at the doorstep of innocents only to have the tables turned upon them fairly early on; movies where, for at least a third of their running time, the bad guys aren't in control, and the thrills come from wondering how far those who have been wronged will go to get even. While the revenge flick has a pretty shoddy history, and while Frontiers doesn't look like it's going to bring much more than grosser-than-usual levels of violence and some hamhanded political commentary to the mix, not every movie in the tables-get-turned genre is an exploitative dud. The concept may have reached its nadir with flicks like I Spit On Your Grave, but that doesn't mean you can't savor a pretty tasty dish served cold from time to time.
KEY LARGO (1948)
One of Hollywood's first, and finest, attempts at subverting the conventions of the innocent-people-beseiged-by-evil chestnut was this powerful, terrifically acted quasi-noir. When exiled gangster Johnny Rocco holes up in a Florida resort to wait out a storm, after which he looks to make a triumphant comeback, he doesn't count on two things: the presence of embittered but hard-as-iron vet Frank McCloud (played with icily ironic contempt by Humphrey Bogart) and his own terror at a coming hurricane. As the movie progresses, Edward G. Robinson turns from utterly unflappable master manipulator (as in his famously cruel scene with alcoholic gun moll Claire Trevor) to cowering paranoiac, and the desperate sense of terror is ratcheted up to unbearable levels by director John Huston, at the peak of his powers.
THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)
Wes Craven announced his arrival as a forced to be reckoned with in the world of horror with this, his feature film debut. Too cheap, too raw and too frankly disturbing to entirely escape the exploitation-flick label, this direly unnerving story about a gang of hoodlums who opportunistically murder a pair of teenage girls only to find themselves, a short time later, staying at the home of the father of one of their victims, has far more going on emotionally, dramatically and philosophically than you might expect. But even if it were just cheap horror, it would be one of the most effective cheap horror films of its era. Powerful, creepy, and almost unbearably tense. Bizarrely, Last House on the Left is based on Ingmar Bergman's masterful medieval drama of 1960, The Virgin Spring!
THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960)
Tellingly, this would be the last of a fertile period in the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's career where he explored his characters' relationship with God. He'd never make another movie like it, and though it netted him an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, its shockingly open depiction of rape and revenge caused waves of controversy at the time of his release. Bergman's favorite actor, Max Von Sydow, gives one of the best performances of his career as the father of a young girl who is attacked and killed by bandits who, through empty fate or inexplicable divine intervention, arrive in his home looking for charity. They find only a bloody end. Bizarrely, The Virgin Spring is based on Wes Craven's groundbreaking revenge-horror film of 1972, The Last House on the Left, through reverse time warp technology!
STRAW DOGS (1971)
Perhaps no revenge thriller in the history of cinema has been more controversial than Sam Peckinpah's brutal meditation on masculinity and cowardice. Easily as vicious and manipulative as the worst grindhouse exploitation flick, it dresses up its blackly beating heart in such undeniable artistry that it leaves even people who have seen it and assessed it time and time again not knowing exactly how to react to it. The film features Dustin Hoffman, in an emotionally exhausting performance, as a mild-mannered professor whose good nature is taken for granted once too often by local bullies; it caused incredibly extreme reactions on its release (with Pauline Kael writing one of the most memorable reviews of her long career in startled reaction to it) and continues to do so even now, nearly forty years down the road.
CAPE FEAR (1962/1991)
This effective psychological thriller, based on a terse little novel by John D. MacDonald, has been made twice -- once in a taut quasi-noir version in the early '60s by J. Lee Thompson, and once in a much darker and more provocative way by Martin Scorsese. The particular twist of both versions of Cape Fear is who, exactly, thinks revenge needs to be taken: the protagonist, Sam Bowden, thinks he needs to take revenge against Max Cady, a vicious criminal who's gunning for his family. Cady, on the other hand, thinks he's the hero of the movie -- he's the one looking for revenge against Bowden, who failed to properly defend him in court years before and doomed him to years of harsh imprisonment. The first is too little seen by modern eyes, and the second is wrongly reviled; both are worth a good look for their tense ambiguity.