Thursday: Cinema Lost & Found

Movie: Thursday

Release Date: 9/25/1998

Viewed: Unknown

Genre: Action, Crime, Drugs

Length: 83 minutes

Rated: R

Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Paulina Porizkova

Writer/ Director: Skip Woods

A man sits in his dining room. His hands are taped behind his back to the chair he is confined to. He wears a scowl on his face for his captor sitting on the floor before him. Brandishing a gun she is a skinny brunette dressed in a skin tight, red dress. There is time to kill as they wait for their mutual ‘friend’. “Let’s fuck,” the girl says causally. The man expresses his displeasure and skepticism but she goes to the other room, puts on some music and retrieves a photograph of the man’s wife. “She wanted to watch.” The woman licks the photograph and sets it down on the table.

After the man again voices his disbelief she performs fellatio on him. It is at this point that the viewer realizes they are about to witness the skinny woman rape this poor man. She unzips the back of her dress and the camera zooms in on her pale boney back. Her dress drops to the floor. Naked she samples a cigarette and then climbs on the man. Strangling him, she tells the man she won’t kill him until he has cum and that maybe, if they’re lucky, she will get pregnant. The women then proceeds to ride him, screaming joyfully as she does. The man tries to dissociate, thinking of his wife. He looks like he is going to be sick.

This goes on for about a minute. The woman tells the man he has great self-control and goes harder. Just when the scene can’t get more disturbing there is a sudden bang. The man’s face is instantly covered in blood and visceral matter. The woman has been shot. Her head has just exploded like a melon. She drops from his lap dead upon the floor.

You are probably wondering what the hell you just read. Sometime in the late 1990s sitting by my lonesome I wondered what I had just watched. You can imagine my shock when I stumbled across this twisted scene on cable. For whatever reason I failed to learn or remember the name of the movie but the grotesque images of this rape murder were seared into my memory. For over a decade this movie would remain in my cinematic lost & found bin.

Even in the nineties one did not always know exactly what movie they had happened upon. For example, in my house if you were watching on the old television upstairs you won’t necessarily have a guide to identify the program or show. I could sit and watch the TV Guide channel but that took forever. If I was feeling industrious I could search the house for the paper TV Guide. Catching a movie from the beginning is always rare on cable. Back in the nineties with no Tivo or rewind functions you had no avenue to backtrack. Watching a full movie on cable takes planning and let’s face it, if you’re watching a movie on cable you’re certainly not planning anything. It makes for a lot of incomplete movies.

The cinema lost and found gives way to a phenomena which I will call cinematic deja vu. Picture for a moment you are at a typical American party. Kitchen counter covered with mixers, keg on the porch, music and a random movie playing with the sound off. The place is lively and packed. Your attention is divided but you view just enough to get that vague sense of recognition. Suddenly you’re ignoring a buddy inquiring about your beverage situation and you’re watching the movie. With still no idea what the movie is you begin to blindly ask your fellow party goers if they recognize the movie. Sound familiar? It usually happens to me with modestly budgeted films featuring one recognizable actor/actress of some clout but that tanked at the box office and is now relegated to the abyss of TV reruns. You know this sad state of affairs: ninety percent of a shitty movie with an additional hour of commercial inserts? The Crow comes to mind.

Today, not only do we have access to a wide array of entertainment media but we have access to an extensive catalogue of information about that media. Websites like Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Rotten Tomatoes and Wikipedia find an answer to even the most obscure movie trivia just a click away.

Life will never be neat enough to watch every movie and every show from start to finish. Inevitably you will still find yourself in front of a television with no answer as to what the hell you are actually watching. If your lost movie is not quite as colorful as Thursday and you feel that odd sense of cinematic déjà vu it is certainly a lot easier to track it all down.

Once lost, but never forgotten. At the time this movie was shot Aaron Eckhart was virtually unknown. Today he has a respectable resume, which includes but is not limited to: Thank You For Smoking, The Dark Night, Love Happens, and The Rum Diary. One faithful day in 2012 I was surfing the Netflix instant watch and stumbled upon a recent add that had Eckhart in it. I took a long look at the movie cover and plot summary and realized I had found it. After well over a decade I had finally located the movie that had provided such a vivid and disturbing memory. The movie was called Thursday.

You might be wondering what I thought of the rest of Thursday. I’ll provide a quick synopsis to save you the trouble. Casey thought he had left his previous life of robberies and drugs behind. Comfortably living the married life in suburbia he is interviewing with an adoption agency. Unfortunately his former criminal career catches up with him in the form of an old associate and a case full of blow. Unsuccessfully staving off a motley group of criminals Casey is eventually taken hostage in his home hoping to escape with his life. What follows is one of most shocking and frankly unnecessary rape murder scenes. While the dialogue is atrocious I don’t want to banish the film to the bowels of cinema purgatory. For shock value alone the movie may be worth an occasional footnote. Surely this movie was going for a Pulp Fiction like feel but came up painful short. To say one good thing about the movie, actress Paulina Porizkova did great job grossing me out, she was filthy and down right nasty.

On IMDB this movie somehow got 7.1 stars but Rotten Tomatoes gives Thursday a more realistic 33% rating. If you still feel compelled you may check it out yourself for free on YouTube. The YouTube viewer comments are generous to say the least. Certainly I don’t want to give this film too much credit. The rape, exploding head scene can be viewed at 52 minutes10 seconds.