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| Courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome |
Though only having two more features to his resume, the
director achieved global infamy with his explicit rape-revenge action-adventure
exploitation flick Thriller: A Cruel Picture. Despite having hardcore snippets from another
shoot spliced in to liven things up, the actual movie is a quintessential example
of what later became known as the Grindhouse film, a no-nonsense exploitation
flick that was short on production values but high on innovation and the
delivery of cheap thrills.
Starring Christina Lindberg as Madeleine, a young girl whose
childhood sexual abuse renders her mute, the film follows the woman who finds
herself drugged, kidnapped and forced into a life of prostitution coupled with
heroin addiction by her pimp Tony (Heinz Hopf).
Worse still, Tony forges a series of hateful letters to Madeleine’s
parents who jointly commit suicide upon receipt of the mailings.
Amping up the nastiness, Tony drives a razor into one of her
eyeballs after she turns down sex with a client, rendering her blinded in one
eye now covered with a black patch. While
now regularly sleeping with various men at the captive hands of her violent
pimp, Madeleine secretly begins self-defense and weapons training, working up
to a master plan to exact vicious cold-blooded revenge on her captors who
destroyed her life.
Cited by Quentin Tarantino as the ‘roughest’ grindhouse film
he had ever seen as well as a point of inspiration for the Elle Driver
character played by Darryl Hannah in Tarantino’s Kill Bill film series, Thriller:
A Cruel Picture is one of the meanest nastiest exploitation films
ever. But for all of its filthy dirty porn
inserts and extreme violence, including a longstanding rumor the infamous eye
gouging scene was accomplished with a corpse, this could well be one of the
most important examples of the rape-revenge subgenre ever made. Somewhere between the Female Prisoner
Scorpion films and Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, the film for all of its
atrocities committed onscreen also bears a fair amount of technical
inventiveness unbecoming of the pictures violence porn roots.
Consider the film’s electronic soundtrack by Ralph Lundsten which
sits nicely alongside the equally down-and-dirty score for Wes Craven’s The
Last House on the Left, comprised of subtle beeps and woops and
reverberating echoes in between a wide variety of stunning shots of slow-motion
bloodletting rendered by Andreas Bellis that would make Sam Peckinpah
blush.
Mostly though this is Christina
Lindberg’s film who functions as silent muse, sex object and finally hardened
avenger without ever uttering a word of dialogue. Channeling the menace of Meiko Kaji replete
with a dark trench coat and a double-barreled shotgun, Lindberg’s metamorphosis
from abused and battered waif to deadly femme fatale unfolding in real time is
wild to watch as the film starts to amp up the action violence including one of
the grittiest car chases ever committed to celluloid.
Banned outright in its country of origin and released in
several heavily censored versions including alternate titles like They Call
Her One Eye and Hooker’s Revenge, the film predates such “video
nasty” fare as I Spit on Your Grave for its explicit and unrelenting
descent into violent sexual depravity followed by the delivery of much earned
comeuppances. Initially premiering at
Cannes with eye-patches handed out to patrons including giving credence to tall
tales like the eye gouging scene, the film was a lightning rod of controversy
almost immediately.
An extremely crude yet
honest look at sex trafficking in all of its tawdriness before shifting gears
into what could be called a prototypical rape-revenge action-adventure flick, the
film directed under the pseudonym Alex Fridolinski, Bo Arne Vibenius
singlehandedly redefined his reputation in one fell swoop from family guy to
shameless purveyor of trash.
While not quite as ridiculous as, say, Paul Grau’s Mad
Foxes which might go down in history as the most absurdly offensive
exploitation film, Thriller: A Cruel Picture doesn’t mince words when it
comes to delivering toxic goods. A movie
that’s indefensible in theory but startlingly accomplished and kind of daring
translated onscreen, the film helped usher in a whole wave of like-minded
regional exploitation flicks while also giving credence to such subgenres as
the Nikkatsu Violent Pinku including but not limited to Assault! Jack the
Ripper.
Though Vibenius’ career petered out after his even more
pornographic final film Breaking Point, the film that got him noticed
enjoyed a renewal of interest thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s film followed by a
DVD premiere from Synapse Films. Years later,
the good folks at Vinegar Syndrome went a step further with their new limited
4K UHD boxed set, helping to canonize Thriller: A Cruel Picture as one
of the gold standards of outlaw cinema.
While some viewers won’t be able to think their way around those porn
bits, this is among the rawest rape-revenge movies ever made with a real air of
viciousness running through its cold-blooded veins that has lost none of its
mean spirted power to time. A rough and
ragged bumpy-ride that feels like a rusted brass knuckle to the face, Thriller:
A Cruel Picture for good or for ill remains among the very highest
watermarks of global exploitation filmmaking.
--Andrew Kotwicki
