Revenge

Okay let’s get one thing clear: this movie is entirely silly.

Richard (Kevin Janssens) is a wealthy investor who has brought his younger mistress Jen (Matilda Lutz) to a luxury hideaway in a desert. His business partners will join him there for their annual hunting trip, but they show up a day early and meet Jen. She proves too tempting for one of them and after things get completely out of hand the three men leave Jen for dead in the desert. Of course, as it turns out she is not quite dead…

That’s when the fun starts. It’s gory but it is all not very realistic – from the laughable ‘acting’ of the two French actors in particular, to the inconsistencies, to the implausibility of some of what happens. I can’t elaborate without spoilers unfortunately, but if you do watch this movie you’ll know soon enough. It’s all for effect, so you have to be willing to leave your logic functions at the door.

The most gore is actually the amount of blood. And I don’t mean just the amount of violence, no, literally the amount of blood. It seems that either each individual has at least 30 liters of blood to spill, or they are aliens with a capability to instantly regenerate lost blood. But of course, this is exacly the point of the movie: bloody revenge.

So this all makes for a bad movie you think? Well, yes and no.The style is a combination of serious revenge and slapstick, which sort of works. The characters are one-dimensional; even Jen has no backstory so they’re all mere caricatures.  But Jen is a watchable actress – the only one: the others are poor actors and have ridiculous lines – so that’s a saving grace since she’s the victim/heroine. The other hero of this movie has to be the gore. The combination of a female lead and loads of gore makes it different from typical C-movie horror tropes.

It’s a decent B-movie, watchable over a beer or two with friends so you can laugh it its ridiculousness and inconsistencies and cheer for the heroine, pretending this is a feminist success in a male dominated genre.

★★½