UnNews:Slash and gash is back (with a vengeance!)
|
This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation. |
4 December 2006
HOLLYWOOD, CA - Faced with an unexpected downturn in audiences’ interest in Japanese horror themes, Hollywood movie producers seek to revive an old staple: the “slash and gash” movie, in which nubile young teens are slashed, hacked, chopped, sliced, or diced after getting naked in their bedrooms or along a dark and deserted lovers’ lane.
Just about every horror movie made between 1970 and 2000 was of the slash and gash variety, including some of the heavier box office heavyweights such as I Know What My Breasts Did Last Summer series, the Creamed series, the Wet Dream on Elm Street series, and the Halloween Balls series. Major American scream queens such as Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Neve Campbell, and even Jamie Lee Curtis, who’s grown a little long in the tooth since her breast-baring days on the Halloween Balls series, have starred in such fare.
The slash and gash sub-genre had a simple, if inane, plot: a teen (usually female, but sometimes male as well) shows a little too much cleavage on a hot date (the “gash” part of the plot, the term “gash” referring to a woman’s pudenda, which refers to a woman’s genitals, or sex organs) and is punished, as it were, by a sex maniac or pervert (or both) wielding a knife, a meat hook, razor-sharp claws, or even a Texas chainsaw (which is bigger than other chainsaws) (the slash part of the plot).
Body parts (usually of the “naughty” variety) may be lost one at a time until the victim can no longer unbutton or unzip anything much less masturbate herself or her boyfriend or (in the case of the male victim) penetrate anyone’s or anything’s orifices.
Before screenwriters and others in the business adopted the term “slash and gash,” it was known as “T & A with a twist,” the acronym T & A standing for “tits” and “ass,” and the twist part of the phrase referring to the dismemberment and eventual slaying of the actress who exhibited such body parts.
The Japanese horror plot is just as formulaic and mindless, but it is more surreal and emphasizes more “subtlety and restraint” than slash and gash films, focusing upon revenge rather than sexual exploitation to deliver its chills and thrills. Often, at the end of the spectacle of blood, guts and gore, moviegoers are at a loss to understand what, if anything, caused the carnage. Japanese horror movies, by design, are ambiguous, which is to say senseless, taking as their motto a line from MacBeth: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”
Japanese audiences want their horror movies to resemble their lives, critics contend, which tend to be or to seem inexplicable and irrational. An example of the Japanese-style horror movie is Grudge, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar (if there’s a horror movie of any kind anywhere in the world, she will be featured in it), in which the protagonist is cursed by a three-year-old who dies during a temper tantrum, “in the grip of a powerful rage.” The film is an Americanized remake of the Japanese horror movie Jew Down, which some Americans, mostly Jews, consider an anti-Semitic title, seeing the movie as a symbolic depiction of the Nazi holocaust.
Upcoming slash and gash movies, slated for release during the upcoming year, include:
- Breast Friends, in which Jennifer Love Hewitt exposes her breasts before being stabbed in the chest, “between the cleavage”
- Pussy Willow, in which Alyson Hannigan, playing a lesbian witch named Willow, dances naked under a full moon during a Wicca ritual and is slaughtered alongside a black sheep
- Ass Backwards, in which Sarah Michelle Gellar walks around backward until she stumbles over a dildo collection planted in her backyard garden and is penetrated by a three-foot-long, pointed phallus
- Leg Show, in which Jamie Lee Curtis exposes her calves and thighs as she seeks treatment for varicose veins and thereby earns the contempt of a psychotic plastic surgeon who’s just bought a set of shiny new scalpels
- Trailer Park Trash, in which Monica Lewinsky seeks to make a little “sweet mouth music” with a Bill Clinton-look-alike for whom a bayonet is a Phallic Symbol.
Sources[edit | edit source]
- Wikipedia "Horror film" Wikipedia, December 1, 2006
- Stefan Lovgren "Horror, Japanese Style: Beyond "The Grudge"" National Geographic News, October 9, 2006