Pondo Sinatra

Pam Anderson was already a bankable celebrity by the time Barb Wire came out due to the popularity of Baywatch, and the financial investment for that particular movie was considerably lower than anything Gadot has done: Barb Wire had a $9 million budget, while Gadot’s first headliner, Wonder Woman, had a budget of $149 million. Plus investors in the 90s understood if the movie didn’t do well in the box office they could still make their money back on video rentals.

I looked up Gal Gadot once to figure out what her background was.

She was in a hotgirl magazine (maybe Maxim?)

She made some appearances on an Israeli soap opera.

And then someone cast her in a Fast & Furious movie on the basis of that… very limited resume. Then she had Wonder Woman and some other shit, I don’t remember. And even her fans admit her acting is garbage.

Like, this is the most fast-tracked-to-A-lister I think I’ve ever seen in my life. Someone very powerful hooked her up because there’s literally no other way to make that happen, unless you’re the child of someone who is already famous (e.g. Scott Eastwood, who was also fast-tracked via a Fast & Furious movie).

A-listers are very valuable to film producers. Creating an A-lister usually takes time and a whole lot of financial investment. Producers have to be convinced that an actor can pull in the numbers at the box office, as they do NOT like taking risks with their money. If they take a risk on an A-lister and that actor don’t resonate with audiences, that’s a lot of money gone with little to show for it.

Someone really wanted her, and specifically her, to become A-list famous, and they wanted it bad enough to risk a massive financial loss if she wasn’t able to sell tickets.

I don’t know if this counts, but:

In the 80s, when horror movies were super popular, there was sort of a generic killer that was sometimes used to broadly reference the slasher movie: Hockey mask and chainsaw. The only two specific references I can think of off the top of my head were a Bloom County strip, and the Cape Fear episode of The Simpsons.

The hockey mask is obviously Jason Voorhees, but he never once used a chainsaw (unless he did in the remake, I haven’t seen it in a long time). The chainsaw was intended as a reference to Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The closest thing that Jason ever used to a chainsaw was a gas-powered tree saw which is a circular blade on a long stem; he used this in Part 7. Jason used a lot of weapons, many of which were household appliances, but his signature weapon was a machete, not a chainsaw.

I watched 48 Hrs. (1982) and Trading Places (1983) last week. I had a need to see Eddie Murphy’s early career.

I saw The Monkey (2025) the other day. Started out darkly comic, ended darkly comic, I had a good time. I don’t even remember if I’ve ever read the short story it’s based on but I’ve heard that it’s a pretty big departure from the source material, although maybe that’s for the best because Stephen King isn’t exactly known for being ha-ha funny.

The original Police Academy has a scene where Mahoney hires a prostitute and sneaks her under a podium, where she performs what one might call “surprise fellatio” on Captain Lassard while he gives a speech. Afterwards, Mahoney pops out from under the podium and waves to Lassard, suggesting that he was the one who performed the fellatio. Edgy and hilarious in 1984, but I think most modern audiences would recognize it as sexual assault followed up with a homophobic response. (Although I will say Lassard’s response was almost progressive by 80s standards.)

Hamburger: The Motion Picture has a similar oral sex related sexual assault gag as well, where a guy goes down on a girl from under the table. The scene also takes place in a Chinese restaurant with, you know, one of those menus with the racist jokes. (The movie itself is still pretty funny, though.)

In terms of rape in movies, though, there’s one in particular in Saturday Night Fever, of all things. For the most part, it’s a classic movie, but there’s a scene where the protagonist’s friends all gang rape one of their other friends for reasons that are not really clear, and afterwards John Travolta’s character tells her she deserved it, and yeah, just an awful scene that, I don’t know, maybe it made sense in 1977 but it aged poorly very fast. Saturday Night Fever is very culturally relevant, it’s the movie that made disco a mainstream phenomenon in the US, but that one scene is fucked up.

I mean, if anything makes that scene any better is that there’s nothing super explicit about it. They position themselves with their clothes on, there’s a cut to a different scene, and when they cut back they’re already done. Yes, it’s rape, but the way people talk about it you’d think it was much more hardcore than it really is.

The thing about Revenge of the Nerds is that there was tons of backlash even when it was new. The sequel barely has any sex in it at all by comparison, it’s because the creators caught a fair amount of grief so they had to make Part II a tad more family-friendly (there’s still a scene where they all get stoned though lol).