That was why I couldn't find Mimi Cave's Fresh on Disney+ when I first looked for it Saturday night. When my son was watching a lot of Simpsons on his iPad last year, we must have set it so he couldn't watch more grown-up things -- I don't know, maybe certain Marvel movies or something.
That was the only thing we could have had in mind by trying to restrict him, but those efforts were fruitless anyway as we've been able to find all the Marvel movies on there, plus other things that we would definitely be trying to avoid if we thought he'd had any interest in them. For example, I watched The Hand That Rocks the Cradle on Disney+, which starts out with a gynecologist committing suicide after he's accused of molesting one of his patients -- which he totally did do.
I'm not sure what else I can find on Disney+ now that I've lifted the parental controls -- some porn, maybe? -- but Fresh for sure came to the surface once I'd done so.
Now of course, this is not original Disney content. The cannibalism practiced in Fresh is by human beings, not singing animals. Like most streaming giants, Disney does not want to limit itself, even if the intellectual property it genuinely owns is vast enough to sustain a streaming service.
No, they've branched out to something called Star, on which you can find The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Crimson Tide (just mentioning one other title I've watched) and yes, a decidedly R-rated movie about a cannibal surgeon who kidnaps women and steadily sells off their meet to a black market of customers willing to pay top dollar.
In the U.S., Fresh is on Hulu, which makes more sense. But Hulu isn't a thing in Australia, so the Hulu content gets passed around as parts of other agreements. I don't know if Star generally gets Hulu content, but I do know some of it goes to other Australian streaming services, like Stan. (Not to be confused with the star of this movie.)
I wonder how many children might innocently come across a movie like Fresh because the parents thought "Why do I need to put parental controls on Disney+? If my little girl's not old enough now to process Bambi's mother being murdered by that hunter, she never will be."
Little Sarah might take a while to get over these nice young women being slowly murdered by Sebastian Stan, though.
You might find Stan any number of other places on Disney+. He's the winter soldier, of course, and there's been so much chatter about him being able to play Luke Skywalker, given his physical similarity to Mark Hamill, that he'll probably turn up in that role eventually, even if Disney has chosen to go with the Hamill deepfakes to this point.
But as a cannibal surgeon who's also quite the talented chef? Little Sarah wasn't expecting that.
I really enjoyed the movie when I watched it on Easter night (eating the body of Christ being the tie-in? The only body I was eating was that of a chocolate Easter bunny). It's twisted and discomfiting in all the ways you would hope, while also remaining light enough on its feet, with just enough of a sense of humor, to keep from being hopelessly depressing. (In fact, I'm seeing that some places list it as a "comedy thriller," though I wouldn't go that far.)
I'll tell you one thing I couldn't get out of my mind, though, but first I have to give you a SPOILER WARNING -- even if the thing that I'm spoiling happens relatively early on in the narrative.
The character we follow is Noa, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones. She thinks she's finally met a normal guy -- er, bad judge of character I guess -- and after witnessing their courtship for about 25 minutes, we finally learn otherwise with the onset of some very bad behavior and some late-rolling opening credits. The delayed credits were a great touch, and I wish we lived in a world where it were possible to get someone to watch Fresh without telling them what it's about -- because that would be quite the surprise.
Anyway, that's not the spoiler obviously.
Noa understandably makes an attempt to escape early on, and the surgeon, Steve, has to punish her for it. Not that he doesn't plan to be punishing her anyway, as he's already told Noa this is not going to end well for her. So whether this is his idea of an increased severity, or maybe some warped notion of leniency, he makes his first cut into Noa and extracts the following:
Her ass.
I'm sure it's preferable to losing a leg or an arm straight away. Maybe the ass has to be the first to go. But it left me thinking about the logistics of it all.
Can you sit without an ass? And what exactly does not having an ass look like?
We don't get any shots of Edgar-Jones without any clothes on to be sure. But you better bet I looked at that area of her body whenever we got a fully clothed body shot of her.
For one, I wanted to see if they made any effort to show her as ass-less. The answer is, no, not really, which might have just been because it would look too weird and they needed her to function mostly normally as the lead actress in the film.
But then I was also curious about how they would use the character given that she doesn't, you know, have any cushioning down there.
Although she does crawl around a lot in the early stages of her recovery, by later in the story she's sitting with some regularity, and without any apparent pain.
Maybe it's that even in something that might think of itself as a "comedy thriller," dwelling too much on her ass might have detracted from everything else the film was trying to do.
In any case.
I'm now interested in going on a bit of a hunt in the Star section of Disney+ to see what other sick and twisted treasures I can find.
The one thing that sort of confuses me, though, is that I thought I might be accessing an American version of Disney+, since I set it up through my American version of iTunes -- which would make anything on Hulu unavailable. When I tried to go on D+ on my phone to search for Fresh the other night, it said I was "traveling," and that the titles might differ from home. Maybe it's that Australia is home in this case, and my phone is the American entity because of my American Google account? That could be it, as the Google Play store is definitely an American version of that.
But now I'm off in the weeds for sure.
Anyway, Fresh is worth seeing, though probably not over dinner.
Leftover chocolate bunnies, maybe.
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