Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives (2010) by Israel Luna

Luna was inspired by the exploitation film genre, in particular the 1978 film “I Spit on Your Grave“ and the Linda Blair vehicle “Savage Streets“. The idea for his self-described “transploitation“ film came while he and a group of friends were watching Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse. “After, we were just playing around and someone said I should do this with drag queens. That would be so much fun. I thought, ’Well, let me try to think of how we could do this with absolutely no budget whatsoever.’ I thought a simple, old-fashioned revenge movie would be easy to write for me. And that’s what I did.“ Luna did not want to tell the story of a male gay bashing victim because he believed that such stories have been told often already. “I wanted to do something more modern and I thought ’Whose story do you never see on the news these days?’ It’s not gay men—it’s transgenders.“