Popular reviews

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  Review by Zach Milne ★★★★★ 10

  This is such an awesome movie.

  It is nasty!
  Porn sex included!
  The eye patch!
  This is Swedish!

  I admit, I don't have an issue with the pornographic scenes slapped into sex scenes. I still believe that you can have a big budget movie that happens to use pornographic sex scenes. Lots of people watch porn (I'm pretty sure) and I never really understood why unsimulated sex isn't acceptable in a movie, especially if it isn't just added for shock value or for the hell of it.

  The movie itself is a mix bag of awesome.
  Poor girl get raped at a young age and from then on, never speaks again. Get kidnapped, drugged and prostituted out. Even though she…

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  Review by ELECTRICWIZARDx ★★★★ 3

  One of the pillars of exploitation.

  Cruel from the very beginning, waves of dismay build and build and become more and more vast until they distort into ethereal violence and slow motion buckshot murder scored by robotic wind, repetitive sirens, sci-fi bleeping, choral singing and Christina Lindberg's deafening silence.

  Arthouse sensibilities applied to the dregs of exploitation cinema. Forced heroin addiction and prostitution, eyeball gouging, ropes of blood streaming from mouths and training montages interspersed with hardcore scenes.

  The space between the screams breathes life into Thriller, elevating it to lingering Rollinesque levels of dreamy time-taking, the revenge is as sauntered through as the miserable build up.

  Iconic imagery, sawn off shotgun, colour coordinated eyepatch, black coat and low angled shots as Lindberg walks from point to bulletpoint in her well oiled plan, never needing to speak, even if she could.

  Essential.

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  Review by Louise Weard ♃ 3

  Definitely the most subversive rape-revenge film I've seen. The sound design was especially amazing, with the irregular synth patterns and the whirring discomfort that accompanied the most disturbing moments of the film. The squibs were very pleasing, especially in slow motion. The slow motion sequences were the highlights of the film, with some magnificent camerawork (those slow zooms were tremendous) and great gore splatter. Only disappointment was the lack of penis mutilation, and I also loved how the film teased me with the possibility of an awesome car chase and then made fun of me for wanting one. The structure was tremendously subversive and succeeded in making me feel uncomfortable, especially with those extreme close-ups of penetration. All around, it's the most subversive and artistic its genre has to offer, and I was floored by it's fascination with unflinching and realistic brutality.

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  Review by WraithApe ★★★½ 3

  "Can you think of any reason why you shouldn't get in this car?" About a dozen, beginning with those driving gloves...

  Bo Arne Vibenius's influential rape revenger blazed a trail for motivated women everywhere. It's visually stylish and transgressive but also quite hard to watch at times. I knew the movie (notoriously) contained scenes of unsimulated sex, but I still wasn't quite prepared for the sheer amount of close up genitalia on display, or for every instance of it to be scored by weird dystopian sci-fi sound effects. There's also a LOT of slo-mo slaughter. In fact, every single kill is shown in slow motion, which is interesting but kinda gets a bit much after a while. In a way,…

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  Review by DBC ★★★½ 4

  Hooptober Fest 5.0
  Film 33/46
  Six Countries (6/6) -- Sweden
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  Cruel indeed. A "rape and revenge" exploitation film that exhibits some of the absolute worst of humanity in a harrowing and hardcore fashion, all to make our lead's well-plotted-out bloody revenge feel truly epic in its execution.

  Christina Lindberg as a mute young woman who suffers awful sexual trauma as a child only to be kidnapped, forced into heroin addiction, and sold into sex slavery once she's an adult gives a devastating and raw performance that is only amplified by how incredibly young she looks. Watching her endure the most graphic rape scenes I've ever seen in a motion picture was shocking and abominable, and included way more labia…

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  Review by Liz ★★★★★

  The ultimate. What makes this so effective is how the inevitable revenge is just as numbing and ugly as the abuse that preceded it. A new nightmare in an already damaged brain — all seen and heard solely through Christina Lindberg’s POV, each shotgun blast slowly reverberating into infinity to a character broken beyond repair. 

  It’s almost kind of perversely (and obviously unintentionally) subversive that something as bleak and nihilistic as this got repurposed and repackaged as a sex film. The 4k restoration I watched had everything but the hardcore inserts, and I’m kind of glad that it didn’t.

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  Review by Joe ★★★★★ 6

  Whatever the next exploitation thriller I see is, it will have its work cut out for it - this is ruthlessly pared down to a sharpened bone, not a single fiber out of place, absolute righteous brutality.

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  Review by RanchoTuVu ★★★½ 2

  Raped by a dirty old man as a young girl and then picked up by a sleazy pimp when she's matured into a young woman, Madeleine aka One Eye, but known as the Pirate by the customers, bides her time and then strikes back. The use of hard core porn was a pretty revolutionary tactic perhaps used to define sex in this kind of exploitative context in which Madeleine is made into a heroin addict and the pimp pays her two packets a day of dope and later a share of the profits, too, figuring she'll never amount to much and probably overdose and die at some point. Even though she strikes back with a sawed off shotgun, karate, and rally driving skills, it's a bleak kind of rush compared to what you'd get from watching a cheap revenge AIP flick from the early 70s. This is relentless Euro-Swedish grime in your face stuff with few, very few, redeeming qualities.

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  Review by Bob McQueen ★★★★★ 4

  Really is the cream on the top exploitation, isn't it?

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 1

  About 45 minutes of this 100 minute film felt like they were devoted to the training montage. Terrible hardcore porn is cut into perfectly reasonable sex scenes. The plot is an over-the-top rape-and-revenge piece. The dubbing is distractingly bad at parts. And life ammunition was apparently used during the filming, but what upset people was the rumor that an actual cadaver was used in the eye-gouging scene. Personally, that sounds like dedicated, responsible film making to me, especially comparatively.

  This isn't really a great film, but the aforementioned eye surgery is direct and uncomfortable enough for me to recommend this to weirdos who want to see that sort of thing (like me!). Revenge films, with or without the even more…

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  Review by ratbastard ★★★ 2

  Notorious Swedish rape-revenge / exploitation thriller. Young ‘Madeleine’ is sexually assaulted, rendering her mute. Traumatised and vulnerable, Madeleine accepts a ride from a sketchy bastard named ‘Tony’ - who winds up kidnapping her, pushing her into prostitution, getting her addicted to heroin and leading her parents into suicide. When Madeleine relents, she is punished - taking a knife in the eye. Madeleine eventually exacts gruesome revenge. A resonating, problematic (to say the least), grim, experimental, visceral, sour, brutal, violent, sadistic and generally heartbreaking affair. Oddly paced, rough around the edges and absolutely fucking grim from the offset. Christina Lindberg is outstanding in the central role - full of steely and intense rage, dressed in an iconic cascading overcoat and eye…

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  Review by Patrick Pryor ★★★★½

  What a treat to watch a this expanded 4K restoration in a theater with Christina Lindberg AKA Frigga AKA Madeline, herself!

  The last time I saw Thriller almost a decade ago on a college laptop in my Providence ex-gf's attic apartment, I remember kind of disliking the lurid sensationalization of the rapes preceding the revenge. That's my beef with most rape/revenge films of the '70s in general. They tend to linger on and sexualize the assault, and then try to justify it with some hollow and rushed shoot, kill, stab theatrics. The effect feels like a horny li'l teen ogling babes, sadistically getting off on their trauma, and passing off his own gross behavior as transgressive. An empowering women's picture?…