Since I never heard of the original news story, Mikey D sent along some follow up information to the Stuck trailer. Fox News posted a time line of the incident and the Wikipedia article indicates that it’s been whored out as a CSI episode and a Law and Order episode before heading to the big screen as Stuck.

Crime dramas taking inspiration from real life started way back in the day with Dragnet. There was even an old time radio show, Night Beat, a precursor to Cops where the host rode in a police car along with officers as they went out on patrol. The purpose of these early shows was to demonstrate how scary good the cops were at taking down criminals, to discourage regular citizens from committing crimes, and to entertain. While it could be argued that this early form of entertainment served some kind of educational and preventative purpose, modern crime dramas would be hard pressed to make a similar claim. These days, crime dramas focus entirely on the entertainment aspect. If an episode is inspired by real events, they tend to get sexed up for the camera (although in this case, I don’t think you can get more sensational than leaving a guy in your fucking windshield).

Exploiting real life for entertainment’s sake has proven successful for studios. Reality TV is cheap to produce and brings in gobs of money. And hardly anyone bats an eye when a movie is inspired by real life events. That said, Stuck smacks of sensational exploitation. There’s no message here, no deep meaning, no self discovery. Just a horrible story thrown up on a big screen to grab some cash. It may seem slightly hypocritical of me to be outraged over Stuck when I admit to enjoying a movie series that once featured a woman’s rib cage being torn from her body after she stuck her hand in a vat of acid. Probably a valid criticism. But for me at least, knowing that some sick fuck imagined the “tests” in the Saw series somehow seems much less exploitive than basing a movie on a sick fuck who leaves a man to die in her own garage.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Movies, Horror, Tele, Dumb Ass. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.