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THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE

I was either 13 or 14 the first time I watched THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE in a chopped down, full screen format on a dodgy VHS bootleg. Back then it was titled THEY CALL HER ONE EYE. The blurb on the shoddy box art screamed "One of the best revenge films EVER made!" I couldn't have disagreed more. I still had no appreciation for cinema outside the horror genre at that time - and wouldn't until a few years later when I stumbled across Bergman's THE VIRGIN SPRING at the local video store - and my expectations for something that outperformed the likes of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT or I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE were simply not met by this slow, ponderous film from Sweden.

Fast forward a decade or so. I'm sitting in a theater watching KILL BILL VOLUME 1. So far, I'm a bit disappointed. But then on comes Daryl Hannah and something in my brain clicks. I recognize immediately where Tarantino got the idea for the look of that character. I remember it well but for the life of me I cannot place the name of the movie. I go home and start looking through my VHS tapes but the movie is nowhere to be found - I still have no idea where the damned thing. Imagine my surprise when later I would stumble across a brand new DVD edition of the film sitting in a local video shop.

I remembered not really caring for it but I decided to pick it up anyway and take it home. Watching it again, this time uncut and in a beautiful print, was a revelation. I was completely wrong. This WAS one of the best revenge films ever made..

THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE is deceptively simple. A young woman named Madeleine accepts a ride into town from Tony, a respectable looking gentleman in a fancy car. Madeleine is mute - the result of her being raped when she was a child - and appears nervous but appreciative of the Tony's attention. He takes her out for a fancy dinner before inviting her back to his place. He fixes her a drink. She doesn't realize it's been laced. As she lies unconscious, Tony injects her with heroin, a process he will continue for the next couple of days. By the time Madeleine finally awakens, she is hooked on the stuff. Tony calmly tells her his plan for her. She will work in his prostitution ring. As payment for her "services", he will supply her with two shots of heroin a day, a cut of the profits and every Monday off. When she tries to escape, he chases her down with his car. When she attacks a client, the punishment is much more severe. This time, Tony gouges out her eye with a scalpel.

While it seems a bit weird for a pimp to just go ahead and grant to one of the women he has kidnaped and abused every Monday off to go out and about, this plot point serves a purpose. Madeleine visits her old home to see the family she was forced to leave behind only to find out that they were poisoned and died. Her mind made up, Madeleine uses her spare time and earnings on a variety of things like learning kung-fu, or how to shoot a gun, or how to drive a car really fast, slowly prepping herself for vengeance. Soon enough, she acquires a shotgun and begins hunting down those who have wronged her.

There is absolutely nothing original or different to be found In the film's narrative. It plays by the book completely all the way through to the end. What's different here is the presentation. Director Bo Arne Vibenius, who had worked with Bergman as Assistant Director on PERSONA and as Unit Director on HOUR OF THE WOLF, clearly has artistic intentions. The film is littered with strange stylistic choices ranging from POV shots random juxtaposition of camera angle heights. It feels distinctly Swedish, a slow rolling ball of angst, set in barren streets and wide-open, desolately beautiful landscapes. Though it adheres to the standard action ways of doing things, Vibenius shoots all of the violence in the film is the slowest slow motion you will ever see. During the film's shoot-outs, for example, the action appears to move so slowly that we able to see a gun going off AND the person the gun is aimed at well before the bullets explode into their guts. It's an incredibly disorientating effect that Vibenius uses, I think, to illustrate the unsavory aspect of witnessing someone's death on camera. Instead of a "blink and you'll miss it" moment, he stretches out the deaths in grueling slow motion, allowing us to see the horrible impact, to savor it if we choose.

Vibenius also uses the violence in counter-point to the hardcore sex he sprinkles the film with early on. With the sex, we are shown penetration in disgusting close-up - the actors in these scenes have some of the most unattractive genitals this side of PORNO HOLOCAUST - but the scenes are kept to relatively short bursts. With the violence, the OTHER kind of penetration is prolonged. It feels like each gunshot takes 30 to 45 seconds of screen time. By prolonging it, Vibenius makes it equal to, not necessarily worse than, the coerced rape - "have sex with strangers or suffer from heroin withdrawal" qualifies as rape in my book, not prostitution. The sex scenes are relatively quick. Had Vibenius simply chosen the standard way of doing things - a quick muzzle flash, a lightning-fast explosion of blood, followed by immediate death, we would feel cheated. We want it to hurt. We want to watch them suffer. We want to see them in agony for the same stretch of time we watched poor Madeleine give up her body. A quick death would have been too easy.

The other odd choice Vibenius made with this movie is with the character of Madeleine. How many rape / revenge movies have you seen where the lead character is a mute? With the exception of MS .45 - a movie obviously inspired by this film - I can't name a single one. In Christina Lindberg, Vibenius found the perfect actress to play Madeleine. Lindberg was one of those actresses that simple oozed sex appeal. Tiny, thin, but with the body of a Playmate, Lindberg has an absolutely magnetic draw. Doe-eyed and fragile, we can immediately sympathize with her. There's a real sense of innocence about her and watching her morph from a small farm girl to an avenging angel is one of the movie's genuine pleasures. She has a magnificent scene where she takes down two policemen using her newfound kung-fu skills. It's a pretty unconvincing scene but the mixture of flying blood - literally pouring from the actor's mouths like long flowing strands of crimson - and Lindberg's dynamic on-screen persona is tough to ignore. The evocative and downright cool costume designs for her character, especially the all black outfit she wears at the film's end, seal the deal. From start to finish, Lindberg is mesmerizing to watch.

It's hard to imagine this film gaining an audience today without Tarantino's homage in the KILL BILL films. As I mentioned earlier, this is every inch a Swedish film so it all plays out in a very slow, deliberate manner. Even the car chase scenes - where Lindberg goes about inexplicably causing car accidents for no good reason - are shot in a very detached, very matter-of-fact way. THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE is a decent enough looking film but Vibenius shoots the whole thing in washed out tones, giving the film a slightly porn-like look. The revenge aspects don't kick in until about the 60 minute mark and the final revenge against Tony is perhaps too muted - the violence is largely implied and not shown - to really be satisfying for most people.

Personally, I think this film is brilliant but it does remain an oddity of sorts. It is one of the best rape / revenge films I've ever seen but for people whose tastes lie more in the range of the 1970s American sleaze machines will more than likely walk away disappointed.

Essential viewing.