I was quite impressed with the start of this movie, it has this bleached out look as if made back in the 1970s and you can feel the humid heat of the area as the girls chat and travel along in the car. Once they find the body of a girl beside the road who's been raped and battered things (in terms of acting) kinda slip a little.
The actual rape of the girls which inevitably comes soon after, is probably not violent enough for a movie like this to really get the blood boiling for the expected later revenge. I remember the first time I saw I Spit On Your Grave (the original) I almost wanted to climb into the screen and kill those guys myself. The rape here though (to me) was portrayed a little too erotically (if thats the right word) and didn't convey the true horror that something like this entails. Effectively, if I watch a movie which involves rape and revenge, the rape should be horrible enough to set up the vengeful violence later (which must be twice as brutal to satisfy me). Isn't that what everyone wants?
Hmm... Which leads me to that...
The revenge:
Well, it's just not very gory. OK, some may disagree (maybe I've seen too many horror flicks lol) but a minor hammer beating, and a barbed wire strangulation are a bit weak. Although a better director maybe could have built the tension up that these sufficed. Sadly there's little in terms of tension in the movie. I can see what the director was trying to do by hoping to create a bleak landscape with little dialogue. But a lot of it just doesn't work (again, the early part of the movie is excellent in doing this though). In the end, you really aren't given enough meat to build a huge connection and pity for the girls, and you aren't given enough bloody revenge against the men either. And I must say, that last killing, or form of, caused me to burst out laughing. I mean, really?
This movie sadly, was a bit of a pig's ear.
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