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Five Girl Power Movies That Would Horrify Your Parents

• Five Across The Eyes – Ignore the poor quality of this movie. Yes, it seems like it was shot with a VHS camera using the on-camera microphone. Yes, if you’re bothered by typical teenage girls the first two acts will annoy you (but you shouldn’t be seeing movies about teenage girls anyway if they bother you.) Any movie where the only male actors are playing dead people is a movie that’ll excite the girl power fan.


• Teeth – The trailer elicited literal LOLs every time I saw it play in the theater — not just from me, but from everyone. Those of us who had the pleasure of seeing the whole movie were treated to a nuanced film from an “up and coming” actress, Jess Weixler. Her portrayal of an innocent girl finding her sexuality, and confronting the perverse assaults of her step-brother, is worth seeing alone. The scenes that feature the title’s subject are not in-your-face absurd, but truly frightening and that makes this a quality film.


• Audition – A widower using a casting audition as cover for his search for a new wife gets more than he bargained for. His choice, a seemingly pretty innocent young lady, turned the tables by using the audition to find her next victim. Director Takashi Miike is known for his disturbing violence, and this film may be his second best film behind Ichi the Killer.


• Sympathy for Lady Vengeance – Chan-wook Park’s final piece in the Vengeance Triptych is about a woman who, upon her release from prison, after being wrongly convicted for murdering a boy, finds the real killer and exacts her revenge. Along the way she recruits other wrongfully accused inmates to assist. Park is possibly the best contemporary director from Korea and, while his other films may have been higher impact, this film is his most beautiful. Maybe his visual style was a reflection of the gender of the primary character?


• Hard Candy – If you’ve only seen Juno (or the pitiful X3) then you haven’t really seen Ellen Page. Before those movies she confronted a perverted child killer in his own home, and she was one of only two actors who shared 95% of screen time. Patrick Wilson played the other main character (and went on to do Little Children and The Watchmen) as her adversary. She deserved an Academy Award Nomination for this role, but I don’t expect the Oscars can acknowledge a film this disturbing.

I love girl power films and tv, but I think it’s a bit sad that the only women involved in these films were actors. We need more genre films written and directed by women. What have I missed?