So another Joe Bob special with two movies. The theme of this one was “transgressive” movies.

The first certainly counts. I Spit on Your Grave is an infamous rape-revenge movie, with an infamous extended rape scene. What’s weird about it, though, is that it’s not the kind of exploitation movie you’d think it would be… until it is.

So as the movie begins, it’s in this realistic horror register. Our protagonist is this woman who’s leaving her home in NYC to spend some time at a country house. And it’s doing the thing that horror movies do, of having everything seem idyllic at first. The leafy green of the forest, the peaceful country house where she’s all by herself, the river that she takes a nude swim in.

“Wait,” I hear you say, “didn’t you say that it didn’t start off as exploitation?” Right, and here’s the thing: That scene is filmed from a long shot, not the leering camera panning down over her body that you would expect. And what it’s doing is showing us the perspective of the not-all-there delivery guy who’s spying on her.

The movie continues to work in that realistic mode, with a group of local hick guys who are getting together and talking shit in the way that hick guys do — making fun of each other while fishing, and engaging in lightly misogynistic talk about women from New York and the like. Because we know what this movie is, this scene reads as chilling — these guys aren’t horror movie villains, they’re just kinda shitty guys, and yet.

As the movie goes on, these guys on their boat encounter this woman out canoeing on the river, and they start messing around, circling her and trying to upset her canoe with the waves. They’re a notch shittier than before, but this is still just basic bored hick bullshit.

And then it escalates quickly. And the way the rape is filmed is both brutal and uncomfortable. It’s focused on her perspective, and her emotions drive the scene. (Even to the point of unnerving her attackers at first — as it starts, it’s really only one of the guys who is assaulting her, and the others are visibly uncomfortable; the film shows how the group dynamics break down whatever initial humanity these guys had and make them all participants in the crime.)

And so up through here, you’d say that the movie is incredibly unpleasant to watch, but the charge at the time that it “glorifies rape” is just obviously not true. It’s fucking harrowing, and the rapists are terrible! My take at this point was that the movie had been badly misread historically.

(As a tangent, one worry I had was about whether this was one of those situations where the actress was treated badly, so it was useful that she actually appeared as a guest on Joe Bob, and talked about how filming the movie was a really good experience, everyone was kind and respectful on the set, etc.)

And then we get into the revenge part of the movie, and things get weird. Because, okay, she wants to kill these guys. That’s the premise, fine. And so given that we’re in the horror genre, presumably she’s going to want to murder them viciously and bloodily and what-not, okay.

But what she actually does is murder them sexually. The first guy, she lures into having sex with her, and then while he’s doing that, she gets a noose around his neck and hangs him. The second guy, she talks to and gets him to take a bath with her, once again getting naked with him before she cuts off his dick and leaves him to bleed to death. (The last two guys just get normal axe/motorboat kills.)

And like… even granting that the movie wants to do a kind of dramatic reversal, it just doesn’t seem like something the character would do, and doesn’t tonally fit the realism of the first half at all. And what’s more, this part is exploitative, this part is using sexuality in a prurient way.

On its own, it’s fine; the revenge kills fit into genre norms. But when you combine that silly, salacious second half with the brutal, realistic first half — and especially given the weight of the subject matter — it just doesn’t work. There’s no way you can sensibly make a movie like this. Either half could be part of a movie that works, but not together.

And after all that, Joe Bob moves along to the second movie in this special, Tokyo Gore Police, which gives some real tonal whiplash. Honestly, I’m not even sure what’s transgressive about this one?

I mean, sure, there’s fountains of blood. Sure, it’s full of body horror (as the bad guys are “engineers,” aka mutants who can’t easily be killed, and if you chop off part of their body, it grows back as a weapon). Sure, it has a guy who gets his dick cut off and it grows back as a gun.

But it’s not taking itself seriously; it’s embracing the silliness, and it fully expects the audience to as well. There’s an element of satire to it — there’s a throughline about corrupt police forces and totalitarianism, and fake commercials full of hyper-violence, like it’s a Paul Verhoeven movie — but I don’t think even that can be taken very seriously.

It’s really just a fun movie with a novel premise, a unique (albeit extreme) visual language, and enough creativity and craft to elevate it above the splatterpunk norm, even while its virtues are mostly very splattery. Good solid entertainment for the whole family.

But, uh, keep the family away from I Spit on Your Grave.