Babes In Boyland
Sexism and stupidity -- that's what this year's sci-fi and horror heroines are made of.
      by Sarah Kendzior

Amy Mayfield, the central character of Urban Legends, shouldn't have had a lot to live up to. After all, her predecessor was basically The Noxema Girl, and even the most optimistic of genre fans knew something called Urban Legends: Final Cut was going to suck. On paper, Amy doesn't look that bad -- she's a filmmaker, a director, at a college where people seem to do work. But, oh, she is awful. Not just regular awful. Jennifer Morrison, I-am-woman, hear-me-whore awful.

Failed fanboy creation Jennifer Morrison in Urban Legends.

Pig-tailed, breathy and willfully moronic, Amy (played by the untalented, grating Morrison, better off dead in Stir of Echoes) is Britney Spears in film school -- without the Britney charisma, flashy charm, or helpful lack of dialogue. Urban Legends is the ultimate ode to the failed, male film school hack -- the main character is not only the little-girl-stupid object of lust, she's a glorification of the B-movie that never was made, the career that never quite took off. Urban Legends is an ugly movie. I should probably blow it off as inane, or at least not cringe quite so openly, but there is a combination of smugness and perv-lust that rears its nasty head most in its female lead. Watching Amy made me embarrassed -- ashamed to be seen at this nightmare, but mostly put off by its familiarity. This is the sexism that, despite Buffy and Scully and a slew of horror TV victories, has not quite left the horror genre, and has returned this year, seemingly, at full force.

Urban Legends, of course, has the new horror prerequisite -- the hot lesbian. After watching the Willow/Tara storyline handled so sensitively and naturally on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's strange to encounter such a throwback stereotype, the kind that assures me Joss Whedon is the exception, not the rule, to the male genre filmmaker. Urban Legends's lesbian -- a minor character, really -- isn't quite as appalling, however, as the twin evils of Blair Witch 2, Erica Leerhsen and Kim Director, who, of course, get it on. No one in Blair 2 escapes degradation -- and, okay, everyone pretty much gets it on with everyone -- but the female protagonists are truly the worst in years.

"I am woman, see me whore": The less than inspiring chicks of Blair Witch 2.

Like Urban Legends, Blair is wrapped in film school pretensions, the kind that allow for goofy bacchanals or artfully shot scenes of Leerhsen, the film's Wiccan (Wiccan, you see, meaning "slut") naked, or Director, the film's Goth (Goth, you see, meaning "slut"), also naked. Generally I'm pretty lax when it comes to nudity, desensitized child of cable that I am, but, watching Blair Witch 2, I suddenly had this weird urge to, like, subscribe to Ms. magazine or something. I was offended -- offended in the old-fashioned, "why-are-you-letting-them-exploit-you" sense, that kind that I thought had died out before my time.

But it was exploitive, and it was crass, and it just felt wrong. Not so much the carnality, which slapped you with every scene, but the sleazy satisfaction of it all, the disrespect for the human form, male or female. Horror films generally appeal to me because they are the only genre with some strict sense of morality, what with their ceaseless acknowledgment that violence is horrifying, and awful, and terrifying. Blair Witch 2 had a Donna Tartt-on-crack quality that was simply moronic -- it reconceived a murderous bacchanal as some sort of cool, flashy game. The actors/characters of Erica and Kim were soulless and demeaning, but not quite as bad as what happened to the film's other female lead...

Character Type #3: My miscarriage/rape scene is such a cool plot device!

If I hate a movie or show, I generally try not to rank on the people that, for some reason, like it. As a Starship Troopers/Deep Blue Sea fan, I know we can't all feel each other's pain. But for those of you who liked Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2... I'm sorry, but what the hell is wrong with you?

Hollow, indeed: Kevin Bacon is the Man.

I'm referring to one, specific scene in this all-too-typical millennial horror crapfest -- the scene where the director closed in between a woman's legs to show the bloody remains of a miscarriage, all for the purpose of shock value and gross-out. Forget the virgin/whore complex -- for today's (male) genre filmmakers, it's whore or horror, where a woman's body is either exploited sexually or, in the most primal sense, physically. The crudeness and insensitivity of this scene was astounding (although the protagonist, Tristine, apparently didn't think so, having shrugged off the event by the end of the movie). I can only imagine what it would be like to have suffered a miscarriage and seen Blair Witch 2, but I can't imagine what goes through the minds of the people who still praise, or even profess to enjoy, this movie.

A similar theme this year is expressed in the rape scene of The Hollow Man. The effect is slightly better -- the scene is clearly meant to be horrifying, and the action definitively wrong -- but the victim of Kevin Bacon's invisible protagonist is never heard from again. This was a new one for me, and rather disturbing -- usually filmmakers, even in the crappiest of flicks, establish some thread-bare minimum of character before assaulting the protagonists. Here, the rape victim is an afterthought, not even memorable enough to be followed up on in a later scene.

But enough of that. On to greener pastures, the kind over the hill, anyway...

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