Are you saying the violence in Rambo wasn’t cartoonish? Because while getting blown up with a landmine is a bit more realistic than getting gutted by a bug, the violence in Rambo was not anywhere near “realistic” either.
I’m sorry, I can’t let you get away with that. If “mainstream” means anything it means something that’s marketed through mainstream media (TV, magazines, newspapers and radio as well as the Internet) and distributed in mainstream theaters (as opposed to art houses, or direct to CD/video as most porn is). Both of those standards apply to the Hostel and Saw series. I bet they’re in the mainstream horror section of most video stores.
They’re mainstream. You can’t just handwave your way around that.
Is torture porn mainstream?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=9837393#post9837393
Let’s take a movie you recommended. Shooter is much more violent, and gratuitously so, in my opinion. The implied rape, the high-velocity dismemberments, the calculated murder of several US citizens and a sitting US Senator, the necessary cover-up arson, the assassination of a VIP (an Ethiopian Bishop), the assassination of a dog and Danny Glover’s slurping denture sounds are enough to rate this one as Most Violent in Recent Memory.
Wholesale, No Country for Old Men is also much more violent but since Violence is itself one of the main characters (if not the protagonist), invoked is a Shakespearean tradition that began with “Lepidus’s limbs are lopp’d” and in my opinion ends with the bootscuffs of a strangled deputy on a linoleum floor. In this context Violence is stripped of its violence and instead is a force, smooth and inevitable like the flow of a river.
From Dusk Till Dawn, mainstrean splatterfest.
Maybe. But by the time you get to the end of the movie with the war with the vampires, the violence has definitely crossed over into the cartoonish category.
For what it’s worth, the word from the extras/interviews on the disc is that *Rambo *is the first time the effects of such weaponry on a human body was actually portrayed realistically onscreen. Military consultants and followup response from actual soldiers supports this. Admittedly anecdotal, but still there it is.
There is the case for Shogun Assassin, which I believe had much centered around the “perfect cut”, where you would barely slice your opponents carotid artery so as to let him mist, rather than truly bleed, to death. Blood was featured in many other ways as well. But I guess that’s not really mainstream, though I saw it and I wasn’t a big film geek or nothing.
“Above the Law” had a few brutal moments. The break-the-arm-at-the-elbow bit was about as violent as anything in Rambo.
Well, since the hijack continues to live–several people have come into this thread not to participate in the actual discussion, but simply to keep the hijack going–I’ll address it again.
I’ll share my thought process with you, that led me to ask this question. Maybe if I’d prefaced my OP with this in the first place, this thread wouldn’t have become such a threadshitter magnet. So here it is:
*While watching Rambo, and being stunned over and over again by the intensity and duration of the violence, it occurred to me that I had seen such violence in certain genre pictures *[like many of the movies mentioned above], but outside of such specifically formulaic gore-porn-titillation movies, I’ve never seen anything like it. And considering that Rambo was manufactured with big mainstream money for big mainstream release, I wondered if it did, indeed, raise the bar for such violence in a Hollywood-Product movie.
. . . so you see, those genre-specific exceptions were not “redefined” out of the picture after the fact, as unwanted Scotsmen, but were in fact part of my original conception of the question.
I hope that this further clarifies my question. If it doesn’t clarify it for you, and you want to insist on nibbling this thread to death like a million semantic ducks, I hereby plead with you to move on; this thread is obviously not for you. If, however, you can now understand the nature of my question a little better, I’d love to hear your suggestions for “Top 5 Most Violent Mainstream/Hollywood-Product Movies.”
Apparently this thread isn’t for anyone except those who want to agree with you. So, adios.
My top 5:
- Rambo.
- Rambo.
- Rambo.
- Rambo.
- Rambo.
Nevermind.
Can we just concede that I used the wrong word? Or at least that I failed to define my terms in the OP? If you read my post above about my thought process–that I meant to exclude torture porn in the first place, because this kind of violence has, heretofore, been limited to that subgenre–perhaps you can understand more clearly my OP.
Again, restated (maybe you can triangulate out the meaning from the many restatements I’ve offered): *Is *Rambo the first example of the torture-porn style of intense, graphic, unrelenting violence in a non-torture-porn Hollywood blockbuster? If it’s not the first, is the most extreme example? If not, what films would you nominate? (Leaving aside, for the sake of this discussion, torture-porn and other similar genres, since those films have already “gone there,” so to speak, so it’s obviously pointless to ask such a question of such movies.)
Except, the problem with that premise is that Rambo is NOT a blockbuster. It was made on the cheap for idiots like me who missed seeing Sylvester Stallone being monosyllabic and blowing shit up.
Every movie in the Saw series and Hostel had a bigger box office take than Rambo. Use any definition of mainstream you want, but Rambo is LESS mainstream than all of this “torture porn.” Remember, the first Saw movie was not marketed as “torture porn”, it was just marketed as a horror movie.
It was certainly intended to be a blockbuster. Again, I’m not talking about boxoffice numbers. In any case, surely the sense of my question can be reasonably well determined by now, no?
What proof of that do you have? It was released in the dead of winter (not prime blockbuster time). It did not have a large budget. It did not have any major stars besides Sylvester Stallone. The only people that saw it were those old farts (and young idiots like myself) who enjoy mindless action movies.
I say again, Rambo is just as mainstream in marketing and presentation as the Saw series. Your premise doesn’t fly.
So you honestly can’t suss out the sense of my question? You’re going to hang up on an admittedly vague word like “blockbuster”? Can you please make an effort to understand the sense of my question, and thus from that context the connotation of “blockbuster” that I meant? If not, can you please feel free to replace the word with one that will allow you to continue the conversation?
I guess this is progress, though; the “mainstream” hijack has ended, and the “blockbuster” hijack can now begin.
What am I not sussing out? You think Rambo is mainstream and a “blockbuster.” I say it’s neither and that trying to separate Rambo from the Saw films is ridiculous because they’re cut from the same genre cloth. You then accuse me of not understanding you.
Do I have that about right?
How’s this:
Is Rambo the first example of the torture-porn style of intense, graphic, unrelenting violence in a non-torture-porn Hollywood film? If it’s not the first, is the most extreme example? If not, what films would you nominate? (Leaving aside, for the sake of this discussion, torture-porn and other similar genres, since those films have already “gone there,” so to speak, so it’s obviously pointless to ask such a question of such movies.)
I’d appreciate it if someone could restate it further if it’s still necessary at this point; I refuse to believe that this question is beyond the grasp of language.
Why would you leave out “torture porn” though when Saw (and it’s sequels) have never been marketed as “torture porn.” They’re mainstream horror movies that have an aura around them (much like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre) that they’re much gorier than they are. That’s where the “torture porn” idea came from. Then movies like Hostel and Captive took it further and actually based their plots solely around the torture.