Last week, I sat a spell in the After Movie Diner and discussed the always-hilarious topic of film Censorship with musician and podcast host Jon Cross.
Along the way we touched upon This Film is Not Yet Rated, The Last Days of the Boar, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Sam Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, That Damned Remake of Straw Dogs (recently released at the time), The Last Temptation of Christ, The Evil Dead, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, and everything else in between.
You would do well to familiarize yourself with the After Movie Diner’s back catalog, rate and review it on iTunes, and start reading Jon’s blog. And I’d just like to once again thank him for the opportunity to rant. It was a hell of a lot of fun.
The embodiment of writer Brian Pulido’s fetishes and less than orthodox ideas about female empowerment, Lady Death epitomized, if not largely kicked off, the “Bad Girl” craze of the ’90s. A generously endowed woman who slaughtered her enemies and even those who just mildly irritated her, Lady Death was almost designed to be the patron saint of “sex n’ violence.” Her origin story, which had her burned alive by medieval villagers who held her responsible for the crimes of her Satanist father and which saw her eventually lead a coup against Satan himself, didn’t end with her becoming a hero pledged to defend the helpless. Instead, cursed to remain in Hell as long as one person remains alive, she expedited the process herself by setting out to wipe out the human race. When we’re first introduced to her, she’s doing so by seducing a telepathic child abuse victim in his dreams, goading him into becoming a serial killer, and manipulating a high-tech attempt to mentally cure him in order to turn him undead and thus initiate a zombie apocalypse. Really, in her first appearances Lady Death made Doctor Doom look bush league.