Extreme images of violence against women. "Moral and edgy" or vile misogynist cliche?

maybe one of the points of the film is to get people talking/thinking about violence, many mainstream programs contain violence, including violence against both genders. As comixminx pionted out it doesn't take much for violence to become to norm.

Haven't seen Funny Games, no, but I think that's not a bad way to do violence in film if you're gonna do it - off-camera. Kermode / Winterbottom were arguing w.r.t. Killer Inside Me that the violence against men was all off-screen because the killer didn't care about them, whereas the violence against women was on-screen because those were much more central to the killer's self-image and identity, or something (can't quite reconstruct the argument). But again I'm not convinced that works for me as an argument; I'd've thought you could make it work and still have the violence off-screen.

Part of the thing is that people will take stuff out of the original context, and show just the image itself, or a short clip, so even if it's not glamourised in its original setting that doesn't mean it won't be so in later usage. Another part is that it can be hard to know how other people will take your original image / creation. For instance, when 2000AD started out, the creators thought of Judge Dredd as a clear anti-hero - he shot people for jaywalking and consuming sugar, for crying out loud! But he very quickly became an actual cult quasi-hero despite that.

Kermode and Mayo discussed "Killer Inside Me" very interestingly the other day - summarized by Kermode here. I'm with Mayo in principle (though haven't seen the film myself). I can see the argument that if you are depicting violence against women, depicting it in a non-glamorous way is more moral than doing it in a way that glamourises violence, but I can't say that having those images out in the world either helps anyone or puts forward any very useful moral arguments, really.

(I do like the fact that Kermode and Mayo both consider it routine and normal to discuss issues of misogyny in film, rather than not considering it at all because they're men.)

Vile misogynist cliche, definitely. Women as victims, women's bodies as lumps of flesh to be tortured for titillation. Then a quick "And we caught the nasty killer so that proves that good triumphs after all" to add a thin veneer of morality to the story.

I just don't watch them, but it sickens me that stuff like this has become "mainstream" instead of the under-the-counter videos you'd have had to buy to access this sort of muck 20 years ago.