Rob Dean examines the overlooked, unappreciated or unfairly maligned movies. Sometimes these films haven't been seen by anyone, and sometimes they've been seen by everyone - who loathed them. This is Missing Reels.

Revenge is a confession of pain.

- Latin Proverb

In the 21st century, critics have lent more credence to revenge movies - positing that they're cathartic expressions for audience members who are unable to visit their anger on the various trespassers they believe worthy of such treatment. The driving force behind this sudden renewed bloodthirst was usually identified as the amorphous, generalized anger people felt in the wake of the terror attacks and subsequent wars beginning in 2001.

There was no clear cut "Us" vs. "Them," the definitions were more subtle and thus harder to picture and more difficult to envision fitting punishment. In essay after blog posting, critics posited that since the enemy was more an ill-defined idea ("Terror"), Americans (usually the driving force behind movie trends) needed villains with faces and, more importantly, needed to see these villains pay.

Personally? I think that's a load of shit. Not that Post-9/11 films weren't full of cathartic escapism where Liam Neeson or Denzel Washington slapped people around, or Jack Bauer used "enhanced interrogation methods" on his own brother. Of course that was catering to a collective unconscious need for such vindication, usually wrought in a very visceral and primal fashion. But I don't think that 9/11 is the root cause for revenge films' popularity.

The Theatre of Vengeance has been popular in the arts since the very beginning. Theatre of Vengeance is beyond international borders and cultural mores, pervading every medium and thriving in societies throughout history. The schadenfreude experienced by watching great kings undone by their own stupidity and hubris on stage (Shakespeare, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Goethe); the giddiness of readers exciting at the tales of a wronged man or men targeting their antagonists and ripping them asunder (The Count of Monte Cristo, The Iliad, Richard Stark's The Hunter); and the past century has brought us many classic tales of revenge writ large on the silver screen from Cape Fear to Get Carter to Enter the Dragon to Django to Kill Bill to Oldboy to today's entry, 2008's The Horseman. The tale as old as time isn't star-crossed lovers - it's the journey that begins with digging two graves and ends with both of them filled.

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Today's featured comic book is The Sword by The Luna Brothers.

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