(Slight content warning: Some of the work discussed here isn’t exact safe for work, for a variety of reasons. I chose not to link to anything, but if you dig on your own… y’know. Look Out.)

There’s always a difficulty in viewing works like Lollipop Chainsaw through an analytical lens. On a surface level, the game spews out vicious bloodshed and references-disguised-as-jokes by way of a barely-legal blonde bombshell voiced by Tara Strong, hot off the presses from the seven other games she acted in that year. Cutting deeper, breaking the skin of easy T&A and lukewarm comedy, the blood of the B-movie flows freely, an exhumed exploitation expression bearing the scars of grindhouse cinema. With inspirations ranging from splatter horror and the impressively-direct sexploitation subgenre, and spearheaded by self-proclaimed punk Suda51 and Troma alumni James Gunn, Lollipop Chainsaw is, for better or worse, the same sort of gore-soaked titillation that swept through drive-in theaters and low-budget dive cinemas in the 1960s and 70s.

But, pray-tell, what makes it fit among the prestige derived from that lineage, you may ask? What aligns Lollipop Chainsaw with hallmarks of the genre, with Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! or Cannibal Holocaust? In what way is this game different from the legions of flavor-of-the-month titty games that drop from the garbage shoot that is steam, or the waves of ultraviolent mass murder simulators washing ashore from untold origins? How is it better? How is it worse?

That’s the problem; there is no real distinction. No marks of quality, no big-time writers or esteemed directors could change the fact that the “trash games” of today are, simply, an extension of the “trash cinema” of yesterday. When removed from the context of “children’s plaything” or “unique audiovisual medium”, video games take on the language and identity we ascribe to thousands of films, plays, and books. Looking at work churned out by multi-million entertainment conglomerates, you see the hallmarks of mainstream film being used as the benchmark for excellence. As an interactive mode of expression, it’s inevitable that games go beyond the realm of what is acceptable to a mainstream audience, venturing into the grimey, the messy, the extreme. After all, what is Senran Kagura if not an extrapolation of The Switchblade Sisters? What is Splatterhouse if not the logical conclusion of Hausu?

Now, I understand that this may all come off as statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged, that this could be the result of introspection and pretension too far gone to consider. Before I am soundly laughed out of the Backloggd community, consider: In the Wider Gaming Community’s push for video games to be viewed as art, isn't it also important to appreciate that which goes beyond the traditional accepted view of art? The existence of sleazy slashers and lowbrow smut doesn’t revoke the existence of time-honored masterpieces in film, in written pieces, even in the work of playwrights dating back to ancient times. As the acceptance of gaming as artwork, whatever that truly entails, dawns near, is it fair to deride the messier side of the medium as unapproachable, of being unworthy of contemplative thought? Does Lollipop Chainsaw and its ilk deserve its branding as something holding back serious discussion of gaming, or is that simply an indication of the immaturity of not only the medium, but of criticism around it?