Jennifer Hill rents a remote cabin near a lake, in order to get some solitude while she writes a novel.
On her way into town, she attracts the attention of the town lowlife; 3 guys who work at the gas station.
One night, liquored up in the woods, the men decide that Jennifer is a "Stuck up City Bitch" who is "Desperate for it"; they decide that she needs to be "taught a lesson" and so they take their retarded friend Matthew, who has met Jennifer and has a bit of a thing for her, around to her cabin, where they rape, beat and humiliate her, then leave her for dead.
A month later, Jenifer returns; she has been keeping herself alive in the woods and has occupied her mind with one thought: Revenge!
As with last Saturday's movie, the above is 99% of the plot of the movie, but still not spoilerific; such is the nature of Rape-Revenge movies that "A woman gets raped, and then she or someone else takes revenge" is always going to be both the entire plot, and the bare minimum that can be said; the devil with these things, is in the details.
After a (too brief) character introduction, in which the bad guys are clearly not nice people, we move almost immediately into the attack.
The attack is, as with Last House on the Left, realistic and brutal. There is far more mental abuse and ridicule in the attack here, and Jennifer is raped multiple times (and in multiple orifices); I think it's fair to say she has a far worse time of it than Mari did.
Jennifer's revenge - which here makes up the largest portion of the movie - is a far more visceral experience than Mari's was and, although I criticised Last House for it's one punch-the-air moment, this is a very different film, and in this context, the fact that the 2nd half of the movie is basically a "Killer Hero" movie works to it's favor. We see early on how damaged Jenniffer is, and her revenge is carefully planned and pre-meditated; couple this with the fact that she is taking the revenge herself, and that she uses a degree of 'poetic justice' in her torture and killing of the men (Each revenge is tailored to some individual thing that each man, personally, said or did during the attack) and Jennifer (and by extension the movie) earns the right to be vicious; and justifies our approval.
In many ways, this is the dumber sibling to Last House, the 'popcorn version' if you like; but it achieves this without cheapening the rape, and (as a piece of entertainment, if not as an important movie) this works to it's credit.
Recommended.
My more spoiler filled review of this movie, which compares it to the original 1978 version can be found at VideoNastyAWeek.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment