Bedevilled

I’m so sorry I haven’t been updating this blog!  Real life got the best of me – I applied to the spring semester at a local college, got some of my real life in order, and actually got out of the house a bit, which are all good things, but rather distracting from angry review blogging.

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[Trigger warning: Rape, abuse]

It’s no secret how much I dislike rape-revenge flicks.  For one thing, they’re nearly always brought to us by male writers and directors, who, while still being potential victims of sexual assault, are statistically less likely to encounter it, and don’t live with the same constant fear of rape that women are practically brought up with.  A man walking down the street at night may fear getting mugged and having his wallet stolen, but chances are he doesn’t have the same gut fear instilled by society that puts women on edge whenever they walk alone, whenever a man seems to be following them for too long, whenever there are no witnesses around to testify their innocence and that they didn’t “bring it on themselves” in the event that they’re assaulted.  For another thing, it plays into the male writer’s idea that a woman can only be strong if she’s “broken” first, and generally, by broken, they mean a survivor of sexual assault.  This isn’t only a narrative device used in this particular genre, but one that lazy, generally male writers tend to use if they want to give a female character a “reason” for her badassery.  Because women can’t be strong characters without being dehumanized and broken down first, but who’s ever heard of a strong male character whose characterization can entirely be traced back to sexual assault?

Anyway.  That little rant aside, I generally despise the rape-revenge trope.  But sometimes a movie comes along that uses that trope in such a human, well-done way that I don’t even notice that the story is, at its core, that same plotline I claim to hate until after the credits roll.  Bedevilled, directed by Chul Soo-Jang, is one such movie.  Simplified, it’s a story about a victim of sexual assault exacting revenge on her abusers.  But it also manages to be a discussion of patriarchal society and the inaction that allows it to continue to be perpetuated, that also has things to say about class issues and the relationships between women, and that’s what sets it apart from basic “woman kills her rapists” exploitation films.

Bedevilled opens with an intense scene of sexual assault, as a woman turns down a group of men’s advances, which provokes them to beat her and drag her offscreen.  We know what’s going to happen to her, the movie doesn’t need to show it onscreen for shock value, and that makes it all the more terrifying.  We then cut to bank employee Hae-won, who witnessed the assault take place, as the police ask her to identify the culprits and she refuses.  She hasn’t got time to catch rapists – she’s too busy calling her co-worker and friend a slut, slapping her, or treating her customers in need coldly.  Hae-won’s increasingly angry behavior gets her a temporary leave of absence from her job, and a call from an old friend leads her to decide to spend her vacation on the island where her deceased grandfather once lived, where she used to go as a child.

The residents of the island – very few, as it’s a small farming community of less than twenty people, and most of the island’s men have died at sea during a storm – are mostly inhospitable towards Hae-won, except for her childhood friend, Bok-nam.  Bok-nam is entirely uneducated; she can’t read or write, she’s an orphan and the community’s sole hard-working laborer, and she’s never set foot off the island.  She’s excited to see her friend again, not only because she likes Hae-won but because of what she represents: a chance for her or at least her young daughter, Yeonhee, to escape from their isolated life and leave with Hae-won for Seoul.

For good reason.  Bok-nam’s life is heartbreaking and horrific.  She’s been abused by nearly every member of the community since childhood, and those who haven’t directly participated, like the stone-cold “Auntie” who serves as the matriarch of the island, have turned a blind eye to her suffering, claiming that it’s for her own good or she deserves it.  Her daughter is the light of her life, but she doesn’t even know who the father is – all the men of the island have been raping her since she was young.  Her husband physically abuses her and makes no secret of hiring a prostitute to come to the island and service him, even while Bok-nam is right outside the room.  Her husband’s brother regularly sexually assaults her and he does nothing to stop this.  Bok-nam tries her hardest to ensure that her daughter’s life will be better than hers, wanting to send her to school so she can make a better life for herself, but the women of the island insist that girls don’t need education.

Hae-won refuses to believe or do anything to help Bok-nam, turning a blind eye – whether subconsciously or by her own choice – to the obviously toxic society on the island, and around her, things just get worse and worse, until tragedy strikes Bok-nam and the poor girl has no chance but to crack.  And it’s almost a relief when she does.  The supporting characters that surround her are so vile – almost exaggeratedly so, at times – that we’re rooting for them to meet a painful end long before Bok-nam takes her sickle in hand.  It’s as cathartic for the viewer as it is for Bok-nam when the body count starts rising.

From what I’ve heard, Yeong-hie Seo, who plays Bok-nam (and also appeared in the excellent The Chaser, which I reviewed here before) received multiple awards in Korea for her performance – and deservedly so.  She’s utterly heartbreaking, and one of the best performances I’ve seen in a film from any country in a long time.  In less skilled hands, Bok-nam could just be a caricature of a victim, someone we felt bad for only because of her lot in life and the abuse she suffers, and not also because she seems like such a real person. Every moment that she’s on screen is acted to absolute perfection, and her more peaceful scenes with her friend Hae-won and her beloved daughter are incredibly endearing.

With the heavy subject material and the sheer amount of sadness that is Bok-nam’s life, this film could easily have been dramatic and overwrought.  But with the exception of a few moments with the women of the island that caused me to pause and wonder if any living, breathing human being could really be that callous and uncaring, it’s never bogged down into melodrama-porn, sob-story territory.  And, the thing I find most interesting about it – one of the big questions it brings up is how much at fault “Auntie” and the women who follow along with her are for Bok-nam’s tragic situation.  From the opening scene with Hae-won witnessing the attack on and possibly rape of another young woman and not speaking up about it, to the reveal that what Bok-nam’s suffered through is not only ignored but encouraged by the other women on the island, the silence of other women in the face of violence, especially sexual violence.  The blame for what happens to the women in this movie falls mainly on the men, but it’s made clear that the people who sit back and watch it happen are also perpetuating this rape culture.  (However, it’s made clear that this is also the fault of oppressors, not the oppressed – before her death, Auntie makes allusions to having shared some experiences with Hae-won, and it’s likely that the women been told that “this is how things are supposed to be” that they’ve adapted that mentality to survive.)  In the narrative of the film itself, the men are the real villains, but to most female viewers, the women, including Hae-won, will seem the cruelest and most villainous of the cast, and it’s that which makes this more than a simple rape-and-revenge exploitation piece.

Bedevilled is definitely a film that will stick with me for a long time, and should, with any viewer.  It’s not a slasher you can walk away from with some chills and a mild fear of a masked killer hiding in your closet.  It’s still a horror film, but one about real life horrors that, even if you haven’t experienced them first-hand, everyone has some experience with, some relation to, whether they’ve been the victims of abuse (even if it’s less severe than Bok-nam’s) or ever turned a blind eye to hints of it.  It’s still scary, but not in the jump-and-scream fashion – in the way that will settle itself in you, the way you’ll never quite forget.

Jenifer

The next Masters of Horror episode I decided to check out was Jenifer, directed by Dario Argento, as I recently reviewed Phenomena and wanted to see how his contribution to the series stacked up against his films.  And… I’m not sure how I feel about it.  There’s a lot about Jenifer that could be construed as exploitative, but it’s also possible to read the episode as commentary on the male psyche, and the viewer is never really given an ending that leans towards one reading or the other.  The one thing it sets out to do, however, is make you squirm, and it achieves this to levels above and freakin’ beyond.

Policeman Frank Spivey (Steven Weber, who also wrote the episode) is enjoying some Chinese takeout in his patrol car when he sees a wacko with an axe attempting to murder a young blonde woman.  As any good man of the law would, he shoots and kills the would-be killer, rescuing the girl.  Her name is Jenifer, and Frank decides she must be mentally challenged – she doesn’t speak outside of whimpers and she’s horribly disfigured.  At first Jenifer is sent to a mental hospital, but worried about the girl, Frank takes her home to stay with his family until he can find a more suitable place for her to stay.  But despite her childlike personality, Jenifer isn’t harmless, and some well-done blood and guts effects involving the family cat drive Frank’s high-strung wife and rebellious teenage son out of the house.

Jenifer herself is a fascinating character, and far outshines Frank (and his subpar acting.)  Who is she?  What happened in her past to disfigure her and leave her mentally broken and vicious?  Is she human, or is she something other?  We don’t know, and that makes her all the more intriguing.  She’s given no backstory, no explanation.  In some ways, you could say that Jenifer is a deconstruction of most mens’ fantasies: the mind of a child, utterly devoted, submissive to the man who cares for her.  A meek little thing most of the time, a horny sex goddess when Frank needs her to be that.  Frank even excuses her away to another character at one point as his daughter, which is a good excuse for why there’s a young girl living alone with him, but also calls to mind some weirdly protective, patriarchal vibes.

But for all Jenifer’s whimpering and fulfilling of the male ideal, she’s still also a killer.  It’s in her nature.  There’s nothing malicious about it, it’s just what she does, and though she’s still Frank’s ideal in every other way, he can’t have that, of course.  Jenifer’s acts of murder and cannibalism are played for horror, to disgust the viewer, but there’s also something about her attitude towards it that makes you think that this is what she’s always done, and you can’t entirely hate her for it.  Frank, of course, can.  When Jenifer’s actions go too far for him, and possibly interfere with what seem to be flirtations with the store owner he begins working for, his response is to tie her up in the exact same position the man at the beginning had her in – the one which he, subconsciously or not, tried to recreate while having sex with his wife earlier in the episode, tying it all together in a big, Freudian bundle of skin-crawling ickiness when you think about it too deeply.

Is Argento critiquing Frank’s treatment of Jenifer as a child/whore/monster?  Is he encouraging that the men were right in trying to kill her?  I don’t know, but it’s given me a lot to think about from a critical standpoint.  Perhaps I’ll be able to find my own sure conclusion after a rewatch, but that won’t be for a good long while.  Jenifer has some very fun moments and some great black humor, for sure, but it’s a stomach-churning episode, and not just because of the gore.  I’ll revisit it when I’m good and ready.  For now, I think I need to go and hug my cat.

Incident On and Off a Mountain FUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOU

Joe R. Lansdale is very hit or miss for me.  For every well-crafted, interesting story he writes (my favorite I’ve read so far being ‘The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out’ because Martha, just… Martha), there are another three that I just find too jacked-up with over the top sexual content, racism (I know he’s trying to paint an authentic picture of East Texas, but a white man throwing around the N-word so casually and constantly makes me uncomfortable) and raunchiness for the sake of raunchiness that I just can’t get into it.  But I loved, loved, LOVED “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road.”  Hitting murderers with dead babies!  That end reveal!  Creative use of nail files!  How could I not have loved it?

I also love anthologies.  So I decided, well, Incident is adapted as the first episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror, which I’ve been meaning to check out after accidentally stumbling on the episode “Fair-Haired Child” a while ago.  Why not give it a go?

WHY DID I DO THAT?!

Maybe it was because the short story itself was so fresh in my mind that I didn’t enjoy it.  Or maybe because they ROYALLY FUCKED IT UP.  It pisses me off to high heaven that I can’t tell exactly which.

The good points: Bree Turner as Ellen is excellent.  When she’s given more to do than scream and run, she really shines.  Ellen is a really great role in general – if only she wasn’t tarnished by some of the awful changes made to the rest of the story.  The backstory scenes of her and Bruce were generally good, and even though I thought her sex scene with Bruce was a little bit too music video-ish for a horror story, it sure looked nice, and the lightning flash motif is visually interesting (even if it does become a bit heavy handed in retrospect.)

The bad points: Hoo, boy, brace yourself for some spoilers.

The killer pursuing Ellen in both versions – she nicknames him Moon Face in her head – is a sadistic torture-happy bastard, yes.  But in the short story, we don’t see that up close.  Hell, the body he’s bringing back home in the story is already dead, not writhing and screaming like Unnamed Blonde Victim Girl in the episode!  All we learn about Moon Face’s tendencies towards torture is from the dead bodies Ellen finds at the cabin, which is one of the big shocks of the story.  But in the episode, of course, we have to see all this nastiness taken out on Unnamed Victim.  We have to see him strap her down to a table as she screams for help and hear her death whimper as he takes a drill to her eyes.  Which is admittedly gross and horrific, but it doesn’t have the same bone-chilling scariness as seeing just the results of Moon Face’s work and realizing exactly what’s going on here.

Here’s a fun fact about me: I don’t do rape-revenge horror.  I understand it’s satisfying for the victim to get her revenge, to see her give the bad guy his comeuppance.  Whatever.  There’s still a fucking rape scene and I don’t do those.

You know what the original short story didn’t have?  Rape.

You know what the TV episode has?  AN INCREDIBLY OUT OF NOWHERE, VIOLENT, DEGRADING, COMPLETELY TRIGGERING RAPE SCENE.  I’m sorry, was crazy, conspiracy theorist, physically and mentally abusive Bruce not bad enough?  We had to make him a rapist to really drive home the point?  BECAUSE I THINK THE ENTIRE AUDIENCE GOT THAT BACK WHEN HE FORCED HIS WIFE TO ATTACK HIM AND PHYSICALLY HURT HER.  THERE WAS NO NEED FOR THIS.  Did you want to get the word “whore” into your script that badly, writers?  Did you feel a burning need to insert the phrase “I’m going to fuck you like the whore you are”?  Because I can’t think of a single fucking reason for that.  Except MISOGYNY.  AND GROSSNESS.  I NEED TO TAKE ABOUT A THOUSAND SHOWERS NOW.  OR KILL MYSELF.  EITHER WAY.

Also… this show ran in 2005.  So really, the costume and makeup team have no excuse for making Moon Face look like Voldemort.  Inbred hillybilly Voldemort.  Seriously.  He even makes the infamous NYEEEEAH face.  And when the quirky, “off his top” as the British would say Hogwarts teacher-esque old man who definitely wasn’t in the story made his appearance in Moon Face’s torture-porn cellar?  I’m sorry, did I accidentally put in my Harry Potter disc?  Am I dreaming some terrible Hills Have Eyes/Potter fusion?  HE TALKED ABOUT CANDY.  AND DANCED.  AND WANTED TO SING WHILE ELLEN WAS TRYING TO ESCAPE AND SAVE BOTH THEIR LIVES.  WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS GUY DOING HERE?  WHAT DOES HE ADD TO THE STORY EXCEPT FOR SOMEONE TO SPEAK ELLEN’S INNER DIALOGUE FROM THE STORY TO (BADLY, I MIGHT ADD)?

I have not been this angry about an adaptation since The Golden Compass.  (Man, fuck that movie.)  It’s a very nicely shot and directed episode, I’ll give it that.  But otherwise?  I want to drill out my own eyes after that rape scene.  Or whichever part of my anatomy will kill me quickest.  I’m not going to stop watching Masters of Horror – the variety of different directors, stories, and atmospheres means I probably won’t have to sit through another episode like this.  But Incident has definitely lowered my expectations in a dramatic way.

Oh, Ellen.  You deserve so much better.

The Chaser

It’s no surprise that I enjoyed Na Hong-Jin’s serial killer film The Chaser, really.  Some of my favorite films I’ve discovered in the past year have been similar Korean thrillers - I Saw The Devil and Oldboy should, in my opinion, be counted along with the most respected masterpieces of the genre.  (Also, it’s not a thriller, horror, or a genre film at all, but I highly recommend the Korean 2011 drama/comedy Sseo-ni/Sunny, which is as heartwarming as it is heartbreaking and rightfully launched Kang Sora’s career.) So maybe my opinion is a little bit biased because of my love of Korean Cinema – but even without that love, I think The Chaserstands up as an excellent film on its own merits.

Shut the fuck up, Joong-ho, I’m trying to eat here.

Joong-Ho (Kim Yoon-Seok) is an ex-police officer (presumably fired for playing the role of the archetypical “cop who doesn’t play by the rules”) who’s turned to pimping to keep his pockets full.  He’s an unlikable man with a quick temper and very little care for the girls who work under him, seeing them mostly as his property and a way of getting money.  Joong-ho believes the women he employs have been running away, until he gets a look at one of the missing girls’ cell phones and finds that one of the numbers in the call history matches up with the last client of each of the other prostitutes.  Now thinking that the last man they serviced is a slave-trader selling his girls, Joong-Ho sends his remaining prostitute Mi-Jin (Seo Yeong-Hee, who completely captured my heart in her very first scene) to visit the client as bait – she’s supposed to claim to be going to take a shower and then text him the client’s address so Joong-ho can catch the man in the act.  But when Mi-Jin sneaks off to give Joong-ho the address, she finds that her phone has no reception and that the man who brought her home, Yeong-Min (Ha Jeong-Woo) is more than just another client…

One of the quotes on the poster for The Chaser proclaims in bright red that the film is “BRUTAL.”  While I’d say that it’s emotionally brutal, the relatively small (at least, way less than I expected from the marketing and genre) amount of on-screen attack sequences is one of its major strong points to me.  For example, early on in the movie, Mi-Jin realizes that there is something very wrong with her client Yong-min after finding what looks like bloody hair in his bathroom.  When she calms herself and tells him she’s going to get a condom from her car, he merely nods and says okay, but when Mi-Jin reaches the front door, it’s padlocked.  A lot of other movies would use this as an opportunity for the first kill of the film: the murderer sneaking up behind the prostitute as she stares at the door in fear, then he attacks her as the music ramps up and she screams.  Instead, the film cuts away, and the next time we see Mi-Jin she’s bound and gagged in the basement.  There’s something chilling to me about not getting to see the attack itself.  This is taken even farther near the end of the movie with another kill – at least later we get to see the attempted murder of Mi-Jin so it’s not all left up to our imagination, but the other death is only shown in aftermath.  (The sequence leading up to that death is one of my other favorite parts of the movie.  It’s meant to work the viewer’s nerves and whoo boy does it succeed.)

The winding streets and back-alleys of Seoul make for a wonderfully claustrophobic setting

The serial killer Yong-min feels all too real.  Unlike other cat-and-mouse killer stories, he has no schtick.  He gives no Jigsaw-esque lectures on why he kills, makes no slick one-liners, or follows elaborate patterns or motifs for his murders (like Se7en or 1/4 the episodes of Criminal Minds.)  He’s just a sick fuck who kills women because he can’t perform sexually.  He acts utterly normal when he’s not bashing a woman’s head in with a chisel.  It’s an utterly disturbing idea: if you met Yong-Min on the street, you’d just assume he’s a normal man.  If he paid you for sex like he does the prostitutes in the film, you’d just assume he’s a socially awkward loser who can’t find a girl to hook up with on his own.  It’s a nice change from the usual Hollywood killer.

It’s beautifully filmed, fast-paced, and very David Fincher, which should be enough to convince any serial killer film aficionado to give this one a chance.  Although there are some scenes that could do with being cut for the sake of tightening the film and keeping its originality, I have very few major gripes with this movie.  Watch it with a stuffed animal to squeeze when the tension gets too high, and enjoy.

Postergasm!

My next film for this blog, hopefully, will be Hong-jin Na’s South Korean thriller The Chaser.  (Nobody does fucked-up thrillers these days quite the way South Korea does, do they?  It’s been MONTHS since I saw it, and whenever I think about Oldboy I still get a bad case of the shudders.  Tongue… scissors… aaaaaugh!)

So my love of disturbing Asian films lead me to this one, but the other reason I’m nearly crapping myself with excitement over seeing it?  The poster.

LOOK AT THIS FREAKING POSTER!  IT IS SO GORGEOUS.  IF THIS MOVIE SUCKS I AM ENTIRELY BLAMING THE POSTER.

I mean, I don’t think it will.  I’ve heard nothing but good things.  But still!  A poster like this one has all my hopes hanging on it.  Please don’t disappoint me, movie!

Now, off to make a cup of coffee and get this pimp-versus-killer party started.

Phenomena (1985)

“What’s your favorite scary movie?”

You know what… I just don’t think I can sum up my feelings towards Dario Argento’s film Phenomena (also known as Creepers) entirely.  Or at least, not all that eloquently.  Not that it’s a confusing or complex movie, it’s actually quite straightforward: murder, girl with special ability, blah  blah.  It’s just weird.  Most of the elements don’t fit together, nothing is really – as far as I could tell – fully explained, and one of the main supporting characters is a goddamn monkey.

The story follows Jennifer, played by a pre-Labyrinth Jennifer Connolly – she was the big draw for me on deciding whether to give this one a watch or not.  I love her, she’s crazy gorgeous, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her play a role badly – the daughter of an American movie star, as she’s sent off to an all-girl’s school in the Alps.  Jennifer is no ordinary girl.  She has an affinity with insects and, perhaps due to the stress of being uprooted and sent to a snobby, exclusive school that seems almost exclusively populated by catty popular girls, has recently begun sleepwalking again.  And then there are the murders of young girls currently plaguing the school’s creepy little village (“The Swiss Transylvania,” apparently) – of whom Jennifer’s ill-fated roommate ends up as a victim of.

Also, its soundtrack includes Iron Maiden.  For no reason other than to be completely confusing, seemingly – the soundtrack switches schizophrenically between metal, electronic, and opera music whenever it feels like switching it up a little.  It’s hard to get all that tense during the lead-up to a murder when the soundtrack itself is growling about knives and flesh, but that may be just a personal quarrel.

The majority of the film is good in the way that most of Argento’s work is – nothing pants-shittingly scary, but a whole lot of atmosphere and style, although it’s without a magnificent set piece like Suspiria‘s.  But the last half hour or so of Phenomena is turns everything up to eleven, and it’s beautiful, in a fucked-up, blood-soaked, insane way.  Everything after Jennifer’s phone call home to Morris after she leaves the school is, in my eyes at least, what movies like this one should be.  I may not have nails any more, because I was biting them so often during the finale – which also features one of the best decapitations in any horror film, ever.

Not recommended for entomophobes.

It’s a very lucky thing that Jennifer Connolly was as fantastic a child actress as she was at the time, because Phenomena hinges almost entirely on her performance.  In less skilled hands, Jennifer (the character) could become a spoiled Hollywood child, and painfully bratty to watch.  Connolly’s version is stubborn, witty, annoying, smart, and just a little bit lonely, all at once.  And it works.  She even holds her own alongside Donald Pleasence – Dr. Loomis himself! – and a monkey.  Not something you can say for many fifteen year olds,  and Phenomena was only her second film!

If you like Dario Argento, if you like Jennifer Connolly, if you’re a fan of the genre at all and don’t mind some ridiculous touches like the soundtrack and some of the hammier moments of horror, you need to watch this film.  Preferably the extended cut, as it fills out the plot a little more, but any version that has the excellent final act should do.  A lead performance that far exceeds my expectations for a tween heroine, some excellent death scenes, and an entirely unique atmosphere make Phenomena more than worth checking out.

Five Reasons Why Enclave Is a Horrible Book

I can’t find a concise publisher’s summary for this book that wouldn’t end up being longer than the review itself, which is maybe for the best, because from the premise alone, it sounds pretty interesting.  Dystopian society, everyone living underground, a female protagonist with fighting experience, zombies!  Intelligent zombies, even!  Hell, there’s even what basically amounts to child murder in this book.

And it makes even that offensively boring.

I mean, I enjoy shitty YA from time to time.  I can forgive bad writing and formulaic plots or love interests in the name of fun.  I’ve read every Meg Cabot book, like, at least three times and have some sort of internal magnet that guides me towards spunky-female-protagonist urban fantasy, even if it’s the most cliche thing out there.  But Enclave is just… bad.  Really, really bad.  For a multitude of reasons, but for your sake, I’m only going to list five.

1. The author constantly describes characters as pale.  Literally every physical description of a character or group must include the word pale, including an inhuman group of simple-but-helpful characters who are pretty much coded by the author as black (did they really need their “hood” accents written out?  REALLY?!) – even the characters who live “Topside,” on the surface instead of in the tunnels, are often described this way.  I think the only characters who weren’t referred to as pale (I’m getting sick of this word just typing it so many times…) were the nameless thugs of the Topside gangs.  I WONDER WHY.  And it’s not because they’ve been out in the sun more than the characters underground.
2. There was a character mentioned named Skittle.  SKITTLE.  LIKE THE CANDY. I’m not against characters with stupid-sounding names in general, but it completely yanked me out of the book when I read that name.  Sure, everyone else has names that I assume were scavenged from remnants of the world before – Pin, Stone, I’ve seriously forgotten what any of the rest of them were because not one single character was memorable to me – but SKITTLE?!
3. The zombies – sorry, I mean Freaks- make no goddamn sense.  Okay, it’s pretty cool how they navigate by sense of smell and hearing in the dark.  And it’s a nice icky touch that they eat their own dead.  But… how the hell do the Freaks become Freaks?  There’s no mention of biting; they just eat their human prey, their bites seemingly have no effect (unless they kill you, I mean.)  And yet they’re still somehow multiplying.  And I could excuse this, maybe, if the author hadn’t thrown in the plotline about the Freaks becoming more intelligent and evolving, because they could have stayed a mysterious, freaky threat that didn’t really make sense, but in the way of not-making-sense that’s still frightening, if I’m making any sense with that.  Also, the physical difference of the aforementioned racial stereotype group in the tunnels implied that they were closer biologically to Freaks than Deuce’s people – and then that went ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE.  Worst.  Zombies.  Ever.
4. SPOILERS FOLLOW, but I don’t know why you’d want to read this book or care about being spoiled, and I highly recommend you read this following part before you dismiss my hatred for Enclave and decide to give it a shot.  When the main character, Deuce, and Love Interest #1 make it aboveground, they’re soon captured by one of the gangs that make up most of the population of now-abandoned New York, and while Broody Love Interest is taken to be beat up and tortured, the leader of the gang, Stalker (YES, HIS NAME IS ACTUALLY STALKER.) basically flat-out tells Deuce that he’s going to rape her.  Later.  You know, when he’s done hunting her boyfriend like a wild animal.  Anyway, he leaves Deuce with a girl named Tegan guarding her, and we find out that Tegan is another girl who’s been kidnapped by the gang, repeatedly raped, and has miscarried twice.  Tegan recognizes that our lead is obviously her savior or whatever and the two escape to find Broody Love Interest before the gang kills him.  When they find him, a lot of badly-written fighting happens during which the heroes face off with both gang members and Freaks/zombies, leaving only Deuce, Love Interest, Tegan, and Stalker alive.  And Deuce is just like, WELP BETTER JOIN FORCES WITH HIM THEN.  Despite the fact that Tegan is RIGHT THERE protesting this decision.  Despite the fact that she’s told Deuce all the things he and his members did to her, and what they planned to do to Deuce herself.  And maybe, maybe I could have excused this – it’s obviously a fucked-up dystopia, the characters have to do whatever they can to survive, I’m fine with books that go to dark places like that.  And then…
5. And then.  AND THEN.  Any doubt I had about the author’s disgusting rape culture views went FLYING OUT THE DAMN WINDOW.  Because instead of looking at Tegan, this abused young woman who’s been through so much, and seeing someone brave, someone who survived an incredibly awful experience, Deuce looks down on her and wonders why she would LET HERSELF BE RAPED.  She judges Tegan for not dying fighting off her rapists.  The protagonist.  Who we’re supposed to sympathize with.

And then Stalker becomes a love interest for Deuce, and this is not shown by the narrative to be at all problematic.

Seriously.  Fuck this book, fuck Deuce and her survival-of-the-fittest bullshit, and especially fuck Ann Aguirre and her victim-blaming. People say we need more strong female characters in YA fiction.  But I’m sorry, if this is the YA market’s idea of a strong female character – a rapist-excusing, heartless two-dimensional girl, BUT YOU GUYS SHE FIGHTS THINGS SO SHE’S TOTALLY STRONG – I want nothing to do with them.