Bo Arne Vibenius's brief film making career brought, what I would surely and non-hesitantly consider, the finest example of rape-revenge exploitation cinema. Apparently, "Thriller: A Cruel Picture" was initially meant as a quick financial generator for a failing Swedish director. Be that as it may and whether or not every positive element to the film was purely "accidental" and only well recieved by certain undemanding 'grindhouse' audiences, "Thriller: A Cruel Picture" bears some unmistakable glimmers of eloquence.
After being raped by a slobbering old deviant as a child, a muted farm girl hitches a ride with a smarmy low-life pimp who drugs her and, over a period of days, injects her with addicting amounts of heroin. Adhering to her physical dependance of the drug and the man supplying her with her necessary two-hit-a-day routine, she is forced into prostitution. She fails to submit to her first trick and scars his face, resulting in the pimp gouging her eye out as punishment. Despite her reliance for her captor and the droves of miscreants and their various kinks, the eye-patched girl refuses to perminantely abide and during her one day a week off, trains in different variations of self-defense and weaponry. Eventually, she becomes a veritable one woman army obsessed with revenge.
First off, like most heterosexual exploitation enthusiasts, I have a favorably biased fanboy fixation for Christina Lindberg and her entire film lexicon - even meandering snooze-fests like the sexploitatin flick "Exposed". Something about the Swedish hottie's minimalist style in acting roles is compelling as she typically played the same quiet, refrained character in many (if not all) of her films. Yet her deadpan performances spark an engrossing degree of sympathy in each role. Even when she's a badass in films like "Sex & Fury" and "Thriller: A Cruel Picture", she retains a familiarly sorrowful element to her character that you can't help but find mysterious. Plus, she ALWAYS gets naked and she's phenomenally hot.
The premise of "Thriller: A Cruel Picture", itself, is really your basic exploit-sleaze-based concept of a battered and degraded woman who lusts for vengeance, but the film does it just right - incorporating hardcore-sex, violence, and actual cadaver desecration. Nice. Also, Vibenius showed some actual ingenuity in film making - showing random, lingering POV shots and depicting every scene of violence in ultra-slow-mo and with odd sound effects.
If you haven't had the pleasure of seeing "Thriller: A Cruel Picture" - a.k.a "They Call Her One Eye" (no one called her that) - you should definatly pick it up. It's not as heavy in violence as "I Spit on Your Grave" or "Last House on the Left", but rape-revenge fans are still urged to check it out.
Bo Arne Vibenius's brief film making career brought, what I would surely and non-hesitantly consider, the finest example of rape-revenge exploitation cinema. Apparently, "Thriller: A Cruel Picture" was initially meant as a quick financial generator for a failing Swedish director. Be that as it may and whether or not every positive element to the film was purely "accidental" and only well recieved by certain undemanding 'grindhouse' audiences, "Thriller: A Cruel Picture" bears some unmistakable glimmers of eloquence.
