Bully, Havoc, Kids (spoilers)

Cafe Society
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Anybody seen these? I just caught Havoc on Starz. It apparently went straight to video, which I find odd considering the solid cast. I saw Bully a while ago, and a buddy keeps telling me to check out Kids as being the same type of film as Bully.

Spoilers follow.

First off, I’d only ever seen Anne Hathaway in Princess Diaries, so my brain pretty much melted into my pants watching the scene in Havoc when she started masturbating on the couch while trying to seduce the AV geek. (Clearly the set was cold that day. Oh my!)

And Bijou Phillips has the skank-meter pinned at “way hot” in both Bully and Havoc.

But getting past the obvious wank material aspect to these flicks, what did you think of them as movies? I found Bully fascinating, in particular the incredibly awkward murder scene.

The most interesting aspect of Havoc is the question of whether or not there was a rape. (As opposed to Bully, where the rape was painfully clear.) Starz offered a laundry list of content warnings at the beginning, dutifully including rape. While I suppose that particular content warning is appropriate, I don’t think there was any rape at all. Once she said no, they stopped and let her leave without further incident. That seems pretty clear-cut to me, but I’m interested in other opinions. (Either agreeing or disagreeing.)

As I said above, I haven’t seen Kids. Don’t worry about boxing spoilers; fair warning has already been given, and even though I haven’t seen it, I don’t care if it gets spoiled.

This thread is multi-purpose. Searching turned up no threads at all on any of these flicks. So any thoughts and opinions on any one of them are welcome. The secondary purpose is to compare and contrast the three, as well as ranking them by preference and/or quality.

Finally, Bully was a true story, and Havoc was not, right? What about Kids?

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Kids seemed to be used as a cautionary tale about how horrible things are for kids, that they’re getting into things “we adults never used to” (much like “Thirteen” more recently). Regardless of that perspective, it is a pretty harsh movie about a kid who could be described as a sociopath in that he used girls and didn’t give a shit. The scene where the girl who has slept around gets her negative test results and the girl who has had one encounter gets the news that she has HIV is a heartbreaker. There’s other stuff that is clearly meant to shock but is almost just sad in its reality and somehow inevitability. Nothing was so whacked that you think it wouldn’t be happening sometime somewhere.

I liked it a lot as depressing as it was.

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I’ve seen all three of these movies. Of the three, I think Bully was the best (although, ironically, the least realistic). Nick Stahl was particularly good in that movie. I agree that the murder scene was well done and I think the details were based on pretty much verbatim transcripts from the trial.

I just saw Havoc about a week ago and thought it was a little scattered. I don’t think the movie did a good job of establishing a motivation for the Anne Hathaway character to make the kinds of dangerous choices that she did. I thought her friends were morons (especially the boyfriend). I couldn’t see any reason that she would want to hang out with that gang.

I agree that there was no rape. The gang ultimately had more integrity than the girls did.