HOLY MOTHERFUCKING CHRIST ON A SHIT COCKSUCKER. Excuse me, I just had to get that out of my system. I caught an advance screening of this movie (thanks Ralph!) and it was certainly a romantic evening. For those who can’t remember, I reviewed the original (review here) and I wasn’t too impressed by it. How on Earth could the remake possibly make me care about the storyline this time around? Well, they didn’t really, but the violence in this version was a lot more fucked up. I’m sure there are quite a few of you out there that will see this film no matter what I have to say about it, and I’m sure there are people out there who will never, ever see this film, but a word of warning for both groups of people…SPOILER FUCKING ALERT. If you don’t want to know everything about this film, stop reading now, but to everyone else, hold on to your butts (for fear of it getting raped).

Might want to run a comb through that a few hundred times.

It’s a tale as old as time: girl meets boy, boys rape girl, girl escapes, girl exacts revenge on her tormentors. I’m assuming you clicked the link for my review of the original, or are at least somewhat familiar with the storyline. Rather than repeat the whole storyline, I’ll just point out the differences. In the original, the girl was raped while sunbathing, then escapes, then is found and raped in the woods, then escapes, then makes it back home, only to get raped again and left for dead. She pulls herself together and uses her sexual prowess to corner the victims and kills them in a few different ways. In the remake, she is assaulted, but not actually raped, at her home, and escapes to the woods to find the town sheriff. He takes her to her cabin to get all the details of the assault, and then the men who assaulted her show up, and everyone, including the sheriff, gets in on the rapings. She runs into the woods, only to find the men again, and, gets raped again. After this raping, she walks towards a bridge, and the sheriff pulls a gun on her, but before he can kill her, she jumps into the river and is presumed dead.

Oh, she’s just going to trim the hedges! That’s totally normal!

A month goes by and no one has seen or heard from the woman, yet the mentally disabled rapist never leaves the swamp where her body should have shown up, haunted by his guilt. In addition to this, the videotape that documented all of the violence that one of the awful rapists kept disappears from his home, and another rapist is taunted in the middle of the night with the flip-flops she left behind. This is about the time in the movie when, cue Hatebreed music, VENGEANCE IS BORN! LET THE BLOOD SPILL! Anyways, get comfortable, because you are about to get all the details of the torture exacted on the rapists.

Nice friendly game of bathtub slam ball!

The disabled rapist is the one who sees her first, and she punishes him by putting a noose around his neck and choking him (presumably) to death. Another rapist is placed horizontally over a bathtub full of water and lye, relying on his own strength to keep him from sinking in. Sadly, he doesn’t hold out long, and his head ends up a melted, disfigured, foaming slimeball. The fat rapist, who was the gay guy in Mean Girls (?), gets his leg caught in a bear trap, tied to a tree and has fishhooks used to keep his eyes open. Fish guts get shoved in his mouth and eyeballs, and birds come and peck his eyeballs out. The main rapist guy gets tied up naked with some horse thing shoved in his mouth that breaks most of his teeth. The teeth that didn’t break get pulled out by pliers, and then his dick gets cut off with hedge shears, AND HIS OWN DICK GETS SHOVED INTO HIS MOUTH. Our protagonist captures and ties up the sheriff, who gets shotgun shoved up his ass. She fucks the sheriff’s butt with his gun and then reveals the final step in her plan: the gun is lined up to not only go up his butt, but to also face the mentally disabled rapist who is passed out in a chair in front of the sheriff, with a piece of twine connecting the trigger to the wrist of the passed out rapist. Wanna guess what happens? Yup, he wakes up, tries to help the sheriff, and the shotgun shoots out the face of the sheriff and into the torso of the disabled rapist, all while she sits outside, lightly smirking, and then the credits roll.

Things do not end well…for this man…

Sorry for all the grizzly details, guys, but I didn’t want to leave anything out. Did this film need to be made? OF COURSE NOT. Did they adequately raise the stakes? In so far as depicting violence, I would say so. The original centered around a woman who got physically overpowered who then used her sexuality and wit to exact revenge on her assailants. In this film, not only was our victim physically overpowered, but was also forced to dance around, pretend to be a horse, and imitate oral sex on liquor bottles and gun barrels. The original film focused more on the physical acts, and even though she wasn’t the brunt of the same amount of sexual assaults, but this film spent more time humiliating and dehumanizing her. She had to live in a shack for a month to rebuilding her physical condition while also devising a strategy for revenge. I mean, she admitted to eating rats and fish to stay alive! That’s nuts! I think that’s why it made sense for her to choose such incredibly extreme punishments for these individuals. In the ’70s, it seemed as though a huge fear was just that of being physically overpowered, and just being a woman in that time period meant you were vulnerable to sexual assault. In 2010, we hope that the world is a safer place, but filmmakers try to add even more trauma to the situation by adding mental anguish that might never totally heal. The message I took home from this movie? Don’t rape people.

Wolfman Moon Scale