Four of Them

-I'm going to get this shit out of the way right now: their are four rape scenes in this. The first one is bearable, certainly not nice to watch, but I wasn't fumbling with my fastforward button. The ones after that, though, include a very rough sodomy over a rock, are fucking vile. Asides from the obvious moral-grounds, decency, whatever, it is uncomfortable to watch because it looks so painful. Even for the guy, it looks like it's some twisted middle ground between pleasure and sticking your dick into a pencil sharpener.

-I wouldn't call this a feminist film, per se. While it certainly has the overtones, it doesn't seem to aspire for it very much. During her first rape, for instance, our poor heroine, Jennifer Hills, is fighting back in that completely useless way women always seem to in movies from the seventies--you know, embarassingly weak little slaps and punches, not even making use of the legs, basically falling down a lot. As if she knew that this was necassary as a plot device, and ahead of time, that she had the sweet promise of gory castration when it was all over.

-Right, so, it's more exploitation that feminist revenge. The kind of flick seemingly designed to inspire the future Quentin Tarantino in his Kill Bill movies. It does get kind of awesome at the end, when Jennifer goes stony-faced killa on her rapists, but this is preceded by a much longer sequence of rapes (first one, stumble around, harmonica which probably inspired Deliverance in some way, second rape, stumble around, rape, throw things, left bleeding and for dead. This all takes a better part of an hour).

-That said, I kind of loved it. So cheesy, and yet it has a reason for holding up its notoriety up against all the other sexploitations of the seventies and sixties. It resonates, for some weird reason.