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Top Five Revenge Films
Diamanda Galás
Hailed as one of the most important singers of our times, Diamanda Galás has earned international acclaim for her highly original, operatic and politically charged performance pieces, as well as her memorable rendition of jazz and blues. Her numerous musical and theatrical works have included the seminal Plague Mass (1991), a mass for People with AIDS; Vena Cava (1993), an electronic work about AIDS dementia and clinical depression featuring Galás' lone voice; Schrei 27 (1996), about torture; the concerts/recordings of The Masque of the Red Death (1989), Malediction and Prayer (1998), and most recently, La Serpenta Canta (2003), a greatest hits collection from Hank Williams to Ornette Coleman, and Defixiones, Will and Testament (2004). In 2005 she was awarded Italy's prestigious Demetrio Stratos International Career Award. Her new CD, Guilty Guilty Guilty, featuring tragic and homicidal love songs, will be released by Mute internationally on March 31, 2008. To learn more about Diamanda Galás, visit her website.
We asked Galás to tell us her five favorite films dealing with the subject of revenge.
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Death Wish
(Michael Winner, 1974) This film resides in the part of my heart that has always known that when all else is lost — most especially when all else is LOST — the blood of our enemies can keep us warm.
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Photo: Blue Underground
Squirm
(Jeff Lieberman, 1976) I like this story of the revenge of fishing worms, mutated by industrial radiation, against the humans in the bayou. The worms' appearance is always heralded by some particularly nasty analog synthesizer work, which was visionary to say the least.
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Vigilante
(William Lustig, 1983) Aside from its positive message to the community, Vigilante gets me for its smarmy songs, interwoven with great string sections, funk, and bizarre instruments, the identities of which I cannot discern offhand, as well as its score's great orchestration.
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Pyro
(Julio Coll, 1964) Aside from Troma's promo for the re-release of this revenge drama, which claims that every art and commercial film before this one is just trash, star Barry Sullivan, playing a man horribly burned by his vengeful mistress, makes a case for the enhanced sexuality of the victims of gruesome crime.
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Photo: Elite Entertainment, Inc.
I Spit On Your Grave
(Meir Zarchi, 1978) What appeals to me here is that the film's beginning gets men hot when our comely protagonist is raped. They get hot again later with her in a warm bathtub... before she exacts her revenge on her attacker by copulating his nether orifice with a nice cold shiv. THE END.