Boxing Helena (1993)

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Julian Sands and Sherilyn Fenn star in this odd-ball drama about a surgeon who chops off the limbs of his feisty lady love so he can have her all to himself. I appreciate a lot of what writer/director Jennifer Lynch (daughter of David Lynch) is trying to say in her script, especially with Sands’s character, a Freudian mess of a man who is trying to win sexual validation from the very person he enslaves and tortures. But the film spirals away from Lynch near the end, first with Fenn’s character reacting in such an unbelievable way as to make any feminist fume with anger, and then with an unforgivable ending that renders this wannabe-provocative film a total eunuch.

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