Tuesday 2 December 2014

Ruptured Review: Savage Vengeance

                                 
Country of origin- USA  
Year of release- 1993 
Director- Donald Farmer
Stars- Camille Keaton, James Cochran, Bill Gatson

The film opens with are main character Jennifer driving through a deserted country road. She eventually parks at the edge of some woodland, she gets out and starts walking though the woods looking for a good place to sit down and read. At this point a second car pulls up at the edge of the woodland, but this time four weird looking guys get out. I say weird looking because they each look like they turned up to do something different. One looks like he is off to a Slayer concert, while another looks like he is here to cut the grass. Clearly the costume design in this film wasn’t really considered all that much. As the four guys begin walking though the woods, they see Jennifer relaxing. They then ambush her and after a short struggle Jenifer is forced to the ground where the four men begin taking turns in raping her. Now, in almost any other film this would be a harrowing and unpleasant scene, but because this film is made with all the subtly of a kneecapping, it comes across as silly. The fact the rapists don’t remove their trousers, or even undo their fly’s suggests they are new to the whole raping people thing. The whole scene was as ineptly made as the ludicrous rape scene in the famously terrible Cannibal Terror 

After this gruellingly long scene, the film jumps five years into the future. And we see a night club with a woman sitting at the bar. At this point a creepy guy who looks like a homeless Kenny Everett slides up to her and asks her to come back to his place, which I can only assume is a cardboard box. She obviously says no, and while walking out of the club she meets the creepy guy again, only this time he has a knife. This is the queue for some very low budget blood and gore. 

We then see Jennifer, who is now nearly 30, and studying at college. It is then established through a crap montage that since she was raped she tracked down and killed the men who abused her. This montage is very similar to the revenge montage in the original I Spit on Your Grave trailer, and to be honest that’s not the only thing that is similar. This whole film is littered with I Spit on Your Grave references, if you took a drink every time you spotted one; you would be dead before you were half way through.

Jennifer later convinces one of her friends (Sam) to go on a short trip out to a cabin in the woods. Have these people not seen The Evil Dead?! During the drive down to the cabin Jennifer and Sam stop for petrol, and are greeted at the pumps by Dwayne, who looks like a perverted Elvis. Dwayne then proceeds to be creepy, and Sam gives him the address of the cabin, I never said Sam was the bright one. After Jennifer and Sam arrive at the cabin, Sam decides to start wandering around the woods by herself at night…once again I never said Sam was the bright one. Sam eventually stumbles upon a cabin that belongs to Dwayne, and of course, he invites her in, and with the help of previously mentioned homeless Kenny Everett, horribly abuses her. The next morning Jennifer starts looking for her friend, but finds far more than she bargained for, in the form of Dwayne.  


I actually went into this film with high hopes. Its shot-on-video which I usually enjoy, it’s got a gory chainsaw kill in it, which I always enjoy. But the thing that really let this film down was…just about everything really. The soundtrack was migraine inducing, the characters were awful, 80% of what happened on screen made no sense, and to top it all off the film is only 65 minutes long, and 20 minutes of that is just rape! I am reluctant to call this a ‘rape revenge’ film because that means lumping it in with classics like the film this is trying to rip off, which is of course I Spit on Your Grave. Also for a ‘rape revenge’ film this doesn’t seem to have much revenge, just a lot rape. I don’t recommend this one, it gets 2/10 from me, very dull indeed.                                                                   
                      
 
 

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