Revenge Movies

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Celluloid Temptation Facilitator
07-03-07
Originally Posted by Phntmbanana
I really liked death proof a lot and i found that scene as thrilling each time i watched it but planet terror got a little bland the 3rd time around but i was very pleased with the QT movie
Thanks for the rep
I've only seen them twice. My daughter plans on buying the DVD though so I'm sure I'll see it again.
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07-03-07
Originally Posted by Banggagiba
Is this movie the same as the one entitled Ruruoni Kenshin: A Romatic Tale in the Meiji Era?
Same character, but it's a prequel OVA. It's darker in tone and deals with his years as an assassin.



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07-03-07
Originally Posted by nebbit
Love this one too Nebbs...we have it and frequently watch it. Dabney Coleman plays such a great sleazy character.



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07-03-07
Sorry for the triple post guys. This thread was calling to me for some strange reason.



Originally Posted by Holden Pike
Addicted to Love (1997)
I can't believe I missed reading this one in your list Holden. T'is another one I love also. Loved Meg Ryan playing an edgier part and seeing how the straight laced Matthew Broderick handled every situation.



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07-04-07
Originally Posted by Aniko
Same character, but it's a prequel OVA. It's darker in tone and deals with his years as an assassin.
I guess I haven't seen this one yet. I need to watch this one!!

@topic

Collateral Damage has some revenge plot in it.



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07-05-07
Jui kuen
aka Drunken Master w/Jackie Chan


As others have said I think Kill Bill is probably the ultimate revenge movie.



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07-09-07
A good list, Pike, although I think Mitchum was much scarier in the original Cape Fear.

My absolute favorite revenge film is Johnny Cool made sometime in the early '60s and maybe the only film in which Henry Silva played the lead role, a trained killer sent to the states from Italy by a deported Mafia chief seeking revenge on former mob members who betrayed him. Silva is a one-man Murder Inc.

Dead Reckoning (1947) is sort of a revenge film in that Bogart tracks down the killer of an army buddy.

But when it comes to revenge films, it's hard to beat a good Western. Eastwood has visited that well several times in Hang 'em High (1968), Joe Kidd (1972), and High Plains Drifter (1973) in which both he and the bad guys are out for revenge. Even High Noon (1952)--Frank Miller and his gang are out to get those folks who sent him to prison; it just doesn't turn out the way he planned.

Redford in Jeremiah Johnson carries on a blood feud with the whole Crow tribe. There was a simlar, earlier film in which Richard Boone was involved in tracking down and killing Apaches in the Southwest. Can't recall the film, but had Tony Franciosa as a Mexican bandit and former football star Jim Brown.

The absolutely best pay-back Western, however, is Valdez is Coming (1971). Burt Lancaster plays former Indian fighter and lawman Valdez as slow to anger, but after being pushed too far by an arrogant rancher and his vaqueros, it's hell to pay as he picks 'em off with his long-range buffalo gun.



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crazed out movie freak
07-09-07
Sleepers is a fantastic revenge film. Plus this cast is unbelievable!
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07-12-07
Kill Bill vol I
Man on Fire
Toxic Avenger



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07-16-07
Kill Bill...Old Boy. Not sure Battle Royale counts here, but it could just squeak by.



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Movie Forums Extra
07-18-07
The Exterminator (1980) is the best revenge movie. I like that vigilante attitude of the main character in this movie.
Tarantino's Kill Bill was worth of watching, too.



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07-19-07
Batman Begins (2006) or Batman (1989)


Carrie (1976)


Gladiator (2000)
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07-19-07
for me it was Falling Down -- the original revenge movie against the world! Maybe...
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Parm A Shaun
08-12-07
Originally Posted by mocoloco
for me it was Falling Down -- the original revenge movie against the world! Maybe...
Not sure that this was really a revenge movie so much as a pissed off guy that wants to kill his wife kinda movie but hey it was very good.

The Crow for me is the best revenge movie ever I mean c'mon the guy came back from the dead! I watch this film at least once a year. "Victims aren't we all!" and "There ain't no coming back! This is the really real world!"
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God's Lonely Man
08-12-07
TAXI DRIVER (1976) - a less obvious revenge story... I think Travis Bickle is lashing back at the ugly world that has made him feel isolated and enraged.

Gangs of New York (2002)
Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
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08-12-07
Star Trek II
Kill Bill (both volumes)
Man On Fire
Payback
Braveheart
Walking Tall (remake is the only one I have watched so far)

I'm also hoping that Kevin Bacon's upcoming flick Death Sentence will be another favorite of mine after I've seen it at the end of this month. Looks pretty damn good as a revenge flick anyways.




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All the Snout...Twice the Ointment.
08-17-07
"I Spit Upon Your Grave". The bathtub scene *shudder*. Now THAT'S revenge.
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One Ornery Sumbitch
08-26-07
Here's an article from today's New York Times about a possible trend in a new spate of revenge flicks...
Unease in the Air and Revenge on the Screen

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: August 26, 2007

“EVERYBODY thinks they’re right in a war,” Aisha Tyler's police detective warns Kevin Bacon's insurance man turned vigilante in Death Sentence, a blood-spattering, stylized new revenge thriller from 20th Century Fox. “But everybody dies in the end.”

It’s a line full of meaning for Mr. Bacon's character, who witnessed his son's brutal murder and now is intent on wiping out the urban gang that did it. But its allusion to warfare may also be a clue — subtle as a shotgun blast to the face — as to why revenge movies are making a comeback this season, as politics bleeds over into another film genre.


Matt O’Leary, left, as a gang member and Kevin Bacon as a man looking for justice after his son’s murder in Death Sentence, one of several revenge movies now in theaters or on the way.

On August 10th City Lights Pictures, a microdistributor in Manhattan, released the indie feature Descent, in which Rosario Dawson plays a date-rape victim who exacts her own harrowing retribution. That film opened only on two screens, in New York and Los Angeles, but Fox takes the theme to cineplexes nationwide on Friday with Death Sentence, directed by James Wan, who created the Saw franchise and now brings his trademark gruesomeness to a different genre. And on September 14th Warner Brothers follows with a slick New York vigilante thriller, The Brave One, directed by Neil Jordan, in which Jodie Foster stars as a Central Park Jogger-like victim who is radicalized into a latter-day Bernard Goetz.

The new movies signal a resurgence of interest in a genre that had its last heyday in the 1970s and '80s. The same production company that made Death Sentence, for example, is also developing a remake for Fox of The Star Chamber, the 1983 film in which Michael Douglas played a judge, frustrated by criminals' being let go because of legal loopholes, who joins a shadowy group offering a faster form of justice. And a tangled web of copyright holders appears to be the only obstacle to a remake of Death Wish, the 1974 Charles Bronson hit that spawned four sequels, according to Brian Garfield, who wrote the book on which the original was based.

The genre is also finding new audiences overseas. One of the most successful, and controversial, British films of the year so far was Outlaw, which critics likened to both Death Wish and Falling Down. It stars Sean Bean as a returning Iraq veteran who forms a gang that metes out deadly justice in a country plagued by violence and crippling political correctness. “Where we are in London I think is where New York was in the late '80s,” said the film’s director, Nick Love, by phone from a boat off Sardinia. “There's lots of gangs and shootings. It didn't use to happen in England. People are feeling impotent. There is a feeling of like, ‘Someone, do something about this.’ ”

Mr. Garfield, who also wrote the novel that inspired Death Sentence, said that he had long since moved on to other kinds of material, but that he understood why audiences today might be ready for a new wave of cathartic, rough justice at the movies. “People are just sort of simmering with the kind of anger that they can't really define, and this kind of movie gives them some kind of release,” he said.

He recalled that when he saw Death Wish for the first time, in 1974, it was a late-afternoon matinee near Times Square, but the theater was packed, “and people were getting up on their seats and yelling, ‘Yeah, kill him!’ ”

Back then, of course, both the avenging gunfire and the social commentary — in blatant exploitations like The Exterminator, more mainstream action movies like the Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force and gritty classics like Taxi Driver — were aimed at the lawlessness of cities like New York.

Now, with murder rates down and cities habitable again, both the on-screen violence and the sociopolitical references are as likely to be about the war in Iraq or the more generalized insecurity of a world on guard against terrorism.

The Brave One, for example, echoes the revenge-speak of political leaders who vow to “waste the bad guys” and use taunts like “bring 'em on,” and it lets a soul-searching character ask, “Hasn't the whole Iraqi debacle taught us anything?” This movie acknowledges that New York has become “the safest big city in the world” while making clear that plummeting crime rates provide little comfort to those who become the statistical anomalies.

Ms. Foster's character feels so secure in present-day Manhattan that she sees no danger in strolling, well past sunset, through the kind of pedestrian underpass in Central Park that two decades ago would have loomed as frightening to moviegoers as the Bates Motel. The brutal attack she barely survives, said the film's director, Mr. Jordan, is a reminder that in this age even a pristine city can be just one senseless act away from utter chaos.

“The reason I wanted to do it was because of the kind of nameless fears people in Western society have at the moment,” Mr. Jordan said in a phone interview from Dublin. “If I was tapping into anything, I was tapping into that. I see a lot of films attempting to deal with the political situation — the Iraq war, or the post-9/11 sensibility — in terms of ways dealt with in the 1970s. And to me the paradigm doesn't work. And I think it's because people at the moment in the West are afraid of the very structure of their society falling to pieces. They're afraid, and they don't know why.”

While Ms. Foster’s character turns vigilante in The Brave One — albeit not as indiscriminately as the Bronson character in Death Wish — Kevin Bacon's mild-mannered father in Death Sentence takes aim only at those who have gone after his wife and sons.

Those bad guys are a gang of drug dealers who rampage and kill unimpeded. But Mr. Wan, the 30-year-old director of Death Sentence, said he saw his evildoers as a metaphor for other things that are causing people to feel powerless to protect themselves.

“There's a lot of these wars we're fighting that we're not really sure why we're doing it, and family members are dying because of things overseas, and we all feel like we're losing control, in a way that we haven't been used to in a long time,” Mr. Wan said in an interview at an out-of-the-way Beverly Hills hotel bar. “The '80s and '90s were times when we were complacent, when we took a lot of things for granted. And now that we see that things can be taken away so easily, I think deep down we want to take some of the control back.”

Mr. Wan said he injected a dose of social relevance as a way of protecting himself. “I knew that in making a revenge movie, the critics out there would already be sharpening their weapons,” he said. Suicide bombings in the news gave him his theme: the unending cycle of violence. Mr. Bacon, for his part, said that he signed up to star in Death Sentence because “I really wanted to just jump around and shoot some guns” but discovered that the film had unexpected depth.

“He answers violence with violence, it spins out of control, and he can't stop it,” he said of his character, who undergoes a Travis Bickle-like metamorphosis from businessman to revenge killer, complete with a self-administered Mohawk, but falls well short of achieving satisfaction.

“One aspect that James and I were very specific about was, yeah, we have a movie that's an action movie, a genre-thriller-action movie,” Mr. Bacon said. “But at the end you don’t see the hero step out into the sunlight and the music swells and he's triumphed. He really is broken. Everything he cares about he has destroyed by picking up a sword.”


Zoe Kravitz, left, Jodie Foster and Victor Colicchio in Neil Jordan's The Brave One,
in which Ms. Foster plays an attack victim.

Intriguingly, Death Sentence places Mr. Bacon's family in an idyllic suburb just a short drive from a hellish urban no man's land. The movie was shot in Columbia, South Carolina, of all places, and Mr. Wan said it took considerable set-dressing to create a convincingly grungy ghetto.

But one of Mr. Wan's producers, Ashok Amritraj, said that the proximity of serene suburb to violent badlands required no suspension of disbelief. Mr. Amritraj, whose Hyde Park Entertainment is also developing the Star Chamber remake, said that falling national crime statistics ignored the many places — whether in cities like Newark or the suburban and rural areas where gangs have spread — that violent crime still has the capacity to terrorize.

That nearness to danger stems less from an inept justice system, he said, than from the social polarization that's continuing unabated, not only in the United States but also worldwide.

“The rich are getting richer, while at the same time the way cities are these days, you're just two miles away from a possible slum or gangbangers,” Mr. Amritraj said. “It’s not like Beverly Hills is impenetrable. One mile away you run into a problem, and your life has changed.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/movies/26halb.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin
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Last edited by Holden Pike; 08-26-07 at 08:10 PM.

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