Intolerable Cruelty

I’ve had testicles on the brain this week. Y’see, I live with a little dwarf bunny named Rex, who arrived with my girlfriend when she moved in, and a week ago he was neutered (so we can get him a little friend that won’t get humped into oblivion). This has meant multiple trips to the vet, checking the area where his two peas in a pod used to hang out, keeping his cage extra clean and spending more money on the whole procedure and follow-ups than I’d care to admit.

The whole ongoing thing got me thinking about groin injuries, and how that act of testicular violence exists simultaneously at very opposite ends of the fun spectrum. The movies illustrate this perfectly. Lo and behold, the IMDb has multiple crotch injury listings. For example, there are 286 titles under “hit-in-crotch,”156 entries for “kicked-in-the-crotch,” 50 titles in the “shot-in-the-crotch” category and seventeen “punched-in-the-crotch.” (And for the record, none of them seem to involve rabbits in any way.)

There are countless films that use and overuse getting hit in the groin as a cheap, but often effective, gag.

It really takes some effort to put a new twist on the ole ball gag. My personal favourite is from Monster Squad, when Horace dispatches the Wolf Man with a swift punt to the hairy Christmas ornaments, after which he proclaims in astonishment, “Wolf Man’s got nards!”

(Note: an excellent variation on the theme comes from The Jerk, in the scene where Steve Martin’s character injures his foot by booting “Iron Balls McGinty.”)

Then there’s the absolutely horrific use of crotch injuries in film. I’m thinking of the penis severing in Hostel II or I Spit on Your Grave, the shotgun blasts to the babymaker in Pulp Fiction and True Romance and, well, pretty much any of the other ones listed here. But at least these are generally perpetrated against bad guys. Some of the most sickening uses of groin mutilation are against innocents, and merely talked about secondhand, as they’re so awful. I’m thinking of the boys in both Candyman and The Exorcist III, who we get descriptions of as having their genitals violently hacked off. Just the very idea is horrifying. (And you though castration anxiety caused angst… .)

That said, the ultimate undercarriage disaster scene in my books isn’t from a horror film, but from an action movie. In action films, the lower torso trauma is sometimes played for laughs, and sometimes played for pain to either show someone who fights dirty or a hero who’s evening the odds (check out this Chuck Norris maneuver).

Or there’s the one that makes me wear an armoured-plated cup and never leave the house: the whack-a-nut torture sequence in Casino Royale. In case it isn’t already seared into your brain as one of the most horrendous examples of man’s cruelty towards man, it’s the sequence in which a naked James Bond is tied to a chair that has had the seat cut out of it; then the vaguely-European-bad-guy-with-a-scar proceeds to smash his underside with a heavy length of knotted rope. Just typing that out makes me queasy. Here’s a link to the sequence, but I’ve chosen a version where someone has inserted comical nut-cracking sound effects – just to take the edge off a bit. Still hurts to watch, though. Unlike the other examples, this one is all too real, probably used in actual torture and much to easy to imagine in aching detail.

Of course, tough guy Bond takes the massive egg-cracking wallops and even manages to squeeze out a couple one-liners through the pain. But there is no way anyone could really endure that. (Well, maybe eunuchs, castrados and my rabbit, for obvious reasons.) Not even Double 0’s double 0’s are that resilient, If you were taking that much punishment in the nether regions, you’d scream so loud and hard, your ancestors would fly out of your mouth.

And you certainly wouldn’t go back to your loverboy spy shenanigans. Without that movie magic, Bond would’ve spend the rest of the film icing himself with a pack of frozen veggies the size of a beanbag chair and trying to breath without crying.

Well, unless, of course, he was actually Iron Balls McGuinty.

[photo sourced from here]

 

-Dave Alexander