Hold Me, Thrill Me, Rape Me, Revenge Me

Synapse Films, those delightful slime who have lovingly repackaged such highfalutin jerk-off material as Radley Metzger’s L’Image and nunsploitation extravaganza Flavia the Heretic for our digital indulgence, recently brought 1974’s Thriller: A Cruel Picture back into the public eye (those who’ve seen it…pardon the pun, if you please). Directed by former Bergman AD Bo Arne Vibenius, the film is a heretofore forgotten classic of the rape-revenge subgenre, non-exploitative in the way that the brutally honest I Spit On Your Grave is and more formally artful than that reigning champion. The banned-in-Sweden (“the first film ever” claims its erroneous tagline) Thriller is a longer cut than the previously available They Called Her One-Eye, including 42 more minutes of hardcore sex, graphic violence, and typical Nordic lingering over one detail after another.

Thriller makes a terrifyingly patient slowburn through the tragic life of angelic Madeleine, beginning with the childhood defloration by a deranged old man in a sunlit park which renders her forever mute, extending through her career as the unwilling property of a pimp who disfigures her (hence the American AKA), hooks her on heroin, and sells her to a multitude of perverts, and concluding with her training for and execution of a gruesome revenge on all those who progressively pecked away at her purity. Despite a few camp flourishes – Madeleine’s lavender and scarlet designer eye patches, the relative absurdity of her secret martial arts training with a military outfit of some sort, her shooting up right in the middle of a lesson at a karate dojo – the film is a harrowing and lethally serious tour of the possibilities for human awfulness, its (strangely Leonesque) conclusion presenting less a triumphant catharsis than a sour admission that in such a world as this one can only fight evil with evil.

While praise for its boldness and tone is due (though perhaps not for its intentions, re: Vibenius’ desire to hide his identity to make "a commercial-as-hell crap-film" to cover the losses from his first bomb), one should be warned that the film is a little one-note. OK, more than a little; it suffers from a decidedly limited expressive vocabulary, which rarely goes beyond the extended use of slow motion, a small assortment of aural drones and whines, and a palate rich in yellows from jaundice to Phantasm sangue. These few things are worked into a successful rhythm, but much of the impact of what genre historian-cum-director Quentin Tarantino has called “the roughest revenge movie ever made” should be credited to the mute, unaffected presence of its leading lady Christina Lindberg.

Ms. Lindberg, who has starred in such films as Love in 3-D and What Are You Doing After the Orgy?, looks to be about 17 of her 24 years, and presents a startlingly convincing semblance of innocence. Just as the scene of her deocculation is so realistic as to have spawned rumors of the use of an actual corpse (a rumor even IMDb repeats this bit of “trivia” as fact), the viewer may find it not improbable that the young actress might simply have been found on the street, tossed into a gunnysack, and hurled into this staged scenario unwittingly. The intercourse is clinical in-your-face real (and admirably lacking in erotic impact), and there is something more than a little unsettling – and for that, undeniably powerful – about watching a porn starlet star in porn and at once “act” like she’s acquiescing but certainly not having a good time. [Note to Reader: see also Rocco Siffredi’s affecting art house turn in Catherine Breillat’s graphic Anatomy of Hell] This considered, her vengeful turn in the final act is all the more compelling.

In conclusion, kick the kids at Synapse some of your hard-earned cash and find out with the Swedes didn’t want you to see. I return shortly for the second installment in my brief survey of new-old rape-revenge thrills, coming back at you with the chamabara shocker Lady Snowblood and, um, Killer Nun. It will all make sense, I swear to god.