Wolff rating: EVIL
Plot summary: Woman goes out to town where she meets the locals, who more or less ``Deliverance'' her.
Biased, pithy comments: This is one of those movies that became a phenomenon---like ``Silent Night, Deadly Night,'' the controversy that surrounded it outweighed the quality of the movie. It's a surprising piece---Keaton plays the exploitation aspects of it with deadly earnest, and it's actually the earnestness that is so disturbing. When this woman is raped, it's ugly, brutal, and makes you look away from the screen. When she takes her revenge, it's to show us that brutality can only be answered with brutality. It's both inept and trying to be classy---the sparse sets and nearly-empty soundtrack work to underline the story's simplicity and to make the gore all the more icky, yet this battles with the cruddy sound work, leaden pacing, incompetent cinematography, and (aside from Keaton and to a lesser degree Tabor) the acting is community-theater or worse. Ultimately, it's no different than Deliverance or Straw Dogs, but is less than either of them---worse writing, worse acting, bad pacing. I can't recommend it at all, but it's not as if these same themes (brutality, rape and threat-of-rape, blood, dismemberment) aren't already well-explored in modern cinema. This is an icky movie, but more a symptom of the loss of innocence from the 60s than the cause of cultural depravity.
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Camille Keaton, Eron Tabor
Directed by: Meir Zarchi