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Blake's 7: Power (1981)
Worst ep of B7; travesty of the show; some of the worst TV ever made
The three Blakes 7 stories contributed by "bs" (appropriate initials) are the worst not just of this show, but TV in general. This last one reaches surreal proportions of badness and misery. Bs sure loved him some wild barbarian men (here enacted by a large dude with manboobs and gorgeous Barbie doll hair), as much as he hated women. That's ALL his scripts are about, and it's clear how much trouble he had abiding by the most basic requirements of the show, e.g. Let our team be the heroes and win, since the team included women and men on a (theoretically anyway) equal basis.
But no, it was just too much for Mr. Bs, he of leetle balls and huge misogyny, to let a character like Dayna (conceptualized as a nigh-invincible fighter and weapons jock) win fights with men, so in his first story he actually makes her lose to his barbarian idol, while in this one she only "sorta" wins because two other women with special powers are secretly helping her. And to top that, he actually has those characters utter the following lines, lest anyone in the audience misses the constraint: "The black woman must win." "Of course." Ah, bs, you clever little meta-plotting dickweed, you.
The episode is just one misogynistic sketch after another, including a horrifying "surgery" in which women are "broken", their will and "power" removed, which renders them susceptible to bearing "sons". One victim of this surgery is Mr. Barbieboobs' wife, who loftily says twice that NOW (after the surgery) she's a Woman, meek and dutiful.
Pella, the leader of the "unbroken" women, is pictured not only as totally evil but also incompetent and stupid, despite at the same time being cunning and in possession of a power that maintained rebel women in freedom all this time. But them's the contradictions that insane, spluttering misogyny will lead one into.
As horrific, ugly, and ridiculous as bs's recurrent misogynistic obsessions and characters were, one could at least ignore them as passing moments. But he didn't stop at inserting his manias, he defecated all over the recurrent characters and tone of the series. His treatment ruined Servalan (in the first of his stories), the Liberator crew (whom he makes out to be nincompoops in comparison with his "uber-dick" knuckledraggers), and the relationships between them. In this story he dismantles Avon, the most complex character of the show, and reduces him to hardly more than a gibbering caveman too--cuz that's how our bs thinks "real men" are. Avon, the mercurial, cynical, insecure, traumatized creature who held a torch for a woman so high his life didn't matter to him untilhe avenged her... Avon who showed so much delicacy toward Callie, who read through Blake... but what's the point--those are not things bs could have conveyed even if he'd cared about them.
Frenzy (1972)
Grotesquely bad. Pity the poor actors...
The only thing that this movie has in common with Hitchcock's past work is his misogyny--never before displayed so relentlessly, so sleazily, and with such absence of redeeming features. Come the screen liberties of the seventies, dirty old men of the cinema could really let it rip, and finally even Hitch got to do a giant close-up of a tit. Bless! The Master of Suspense finally got his suspenders down--and oh, my eyes, my eyes!
The screenplay is tragicomically bad, a cringe-fest from start to finish, both technically (if you need to teach Clunky Exposition 101, look no further) and, supremely, in content. In the first five minutes two men tell us the murder of women has a "silver lining"--they are getting raped first. Oh joy.
The characterization of women, with somewhat of an exception of Babs (who'll nevertheless get raped, murdered, and humiliated post mortem), is invariably awful--they are either monsters or treated as such, even when there's no clue why that should be so (Blaney's ex-wife being a case in point. Her sins, apparently, are that she divorced Blaney AND became a successful businesswoman.) The secretary, played by Jean Marsh, is also grossly insulted by Blaney ("she should be paired up with a 700 pound Japanese wrestler to iron out her creases" WTF?), out of the blue, she did nothing to him.
Even the cameo couple we see in the beginning in Blaney's wife's matrimonial office gives us the woman as the monstrous shrew and the man as her hapless prey. The inspector's pretentious wannabe gourmet-cook wife isn't a monster but a standing joke, so forced and badly played it's torture to watch their scenes.
I feel bad for the many fine actors in this who were probably chuffed to work with Hitchcock, just to find themselves neck deep in a garbage truck. Definitely a top contender if not the winner in a Worst Movie By A Great Director competition.
Les valseuses (1974)
Charming Thugs Humiliate Women, a Lot
I'd give it a ten for atmosphere and performances, but the misogyny of the characters (and, by implication, that of the author, who both wrote the story and filmed it) is too sickening, reaching truly horrifying proportions in the end chosen for Jeanne Moreau's character. Yep, we women should ALL commit suicide at forty, or whenever we stop being able to breed. Yep, there's nothing wrong with us, or the world at large, that a good shag won't cure. I thought growing up female in the eighties/nineties was tough; now I can only be thankful I wasn't around before then. Still, I'd recommend it to intelligent people; unfortunately, this is exactly the sort of movie that attracts most strongly the knuckle-dragging stupid. There's naked breasts (and more) in it, after all!