Heads Up, Ears Down

This blog accurately identifies depictions of violence and cruelty toward animals in films. The purpose is to provide viewers with a reliable guide so that such depictions do not come as unwelcome surprises. Films will be accurately notated, providing a time cue for each incident along with a concise description of the scene and perhaps relevant context surrounding the incident. In order to serve as a useful reference tool, films having no depictions of violence to animals will be included, with an indication that there are no such scenes. This is confirmation that the films have been watched with the stated purpose in mind.


Note that the word depictions figures prominently in the objective. It is a travesty that discussions about cruelty in film usually are derailed by the largely unrelated assertion that no animals really were hurt (true only in some films, dependent upon many factors), and that all this concern is just over a simulation. Not the point, whether true or false. We do not smugly dismiss depictions of five-year-olds being raped because those scenes are only simulations. No, we are appalled that such images are even staged, and we are appropriately horrified that the notion now has been planted into the minds of the weak and cruel.


Depictions of violence or harm to animals are assessed in keeping with our dominant culture, with physical abuse, harmful neglect, and similar mistreatment serving as a base line. This blog does not address extended issues of animal welfare, and as such does not identify scenes of people eating meat or mules pulling plows. The goal is to itemize images that might cause a disturbance in a compassionate household.


These notes provide a heads-up but do not necessarily discourage watching a film because of depicted cruelty. Consuming a piece of art does not make you a supporter of the ideas presented. Your ethical self is created by your public rhetoric and your private actions, not by your willingness to sit through a filmed act of violence.

Keyholes Are for Peeping

Keyholes Are for Peeping. Doris Wishman, 1972.

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Edition screened: Included in AGFA Blu-ray set The Films of Doris Wishman: The Twilight Years. English language. Runtime approximately 70 minutes.


Summary: No particular depictions of violence or harm to animals.


A curious film even on The Wishman Curve. Perhaps because of hurt feelings at a cocktail party, Boy I’ll Show Them Wishman intentionally sets out to make a comedy and casts semi-cult legend Sammy Petrillo as the lead. Petrillo’s performance is engagingly entertaining to whatever degree you look back fondly on the guy from high school who worked hard to be voted Class Clown, and a no-speak-good-English Puerto Rican janitor is played for coarse yucks in his too-large role as the titular Keyhole Peeper. But for my tastes, the funniest bit in the film is that none of the peeped-through doors actually has a keyhole. We repeatedly see our kneeling janitor pressing his forehead against a door above the knob where a keyhole isn’t, or squinting at the key slot of a knob. [Why Oh Why is there not a Wishman film called Key Slot of a Knob?]  Rest assured, this is not a career arc-changing narrative conceit on the part of our director. It is just Oh Whatever Doris being Oh Whatever Doris, setting herself up for the next cocktail party.

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