#lizzie borden
Promotional still of Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart in Lizzie(2018).
Hella wanna see this!
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TASTEFULLY EXPLICIT! ”Sex. Money. Kinky customers. Lunch. For these girls it’s all in a days work.” WORKING GIRLS (1986, dir. Lizzie Borden) at te Majestic. Published May 17, 1987.
Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls (1988)
Directed by Meredith Lucas
Doomsy’s Rating: 93/100 (on my Great Films list!)
A radical, punk explosion of feminine rage.
I don’t even know how to describe this, other than it being absolutely essential viewing for riot grrrls and punk rock girls everywhere. This is certainly not an easy sell to a lot of people, as some of the production values are unquestionably shaky, but director Meredith Lucas and producer Jon Jost (yes, Jon Jost!) make up for it with some aggressive and hyperkinetic cinematography and stream-of-consciousness editing, not to mention a BANGING score. Lucas is demonstrably a fan of the Russ Meyer school of empowerment, but with a firmly lesbian-gaze toward her protagonists. Everything about this film is caricatured to the point of becoming basically a cartoon. There’s loads of over-the-top comic-strip splattery violence (usually with the abhorrent men on the receiving end) and tons of scenes of the girls walking around carrying immense shotguns and wearing punk leather jackets and the whole movie just feels like the biggest riot grrrl recruitment ad I’ve ever seen (in the best way possible).
It’s interesting to note how the story is told from a male perspective (a clearly-defined attack on that gender’s perceptions of women as a threat to their own insecurities), as all the men depicted are either buffoons, selfish pigs, or almost playing a comic-book level of misogyny in a villain-screaming-about-world-domination way. There’s sequences where the male narrator literally describes women as “another, more dangerous species” and it is through this satire that we understand not only the brilliantly self-deprecating style of Lucas (not unlike Jon Moritsugu’s attack on L.A. culture’s historically despicable treatment of Asian-Americans) where violence begets violence, but here in the fantasy world of The Leather Girls it is the women who hold all the power, and all the best weapons. This is fantastic lo-fi filmmaking, and simply a cult classic waiting for to be found. If you love punk cinema, feminism, Lizzie Borden, or any of the 80s underground, this is gonna hit all the notes you want.
Please, everyone reading this give it a watch. It’s so worth a viewing.
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Lizzie Borden was an American woman who was tried and acquitted in 1893 for the axe murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts.
1. The axe used to kill Andrew and Abby Borden (the handle is broken off). Many believe Lizzie Borden killed her parents although she was acquitted of the crime.
2. Abby Borden’s skull.
3. Andrew Borden’s skull.
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