Nancy Allen stars as a reporter named Jillian Grey who is doing a story on sex traffickers. While trying to get her scoop, she winds up kidnapped by the white slavers along with two wannabe models (Michele Little and Gina Gershon). Together, they make a daring escape from the clutches of the villain, Cicero (Martin Landau) with the help of Boone (Knots Landing’s Ted Shackleford), a shady, but loveable black marketeer. When Cicero kidnaps Jillian’s daughter, the team join forces to get her back.
Sweet Revenge is a silly, uneven, but mostly entertaining adventure picture. It suffers from an identity crisis as it can’t seem to make up its mind whether it wants to be a sexploitation flick or a cheap Indiana Jones rip-off. Shackleford is especially entertaining as the ne’er-do-well adventurer who finds himself in one precarious situation after the other. He has a good chemistry with Allen, who kind of feels like she’s acting in an entirely different movie sometimes. Gershon also steals scenes as one of her tough but spunky pals.
Sweet Revenge sometimes feels like an early Jim Wynorski movie. There’s even a completely gratuitous nude scene featuring Little and Gershon under a waterfall that only feels like it was there to earn the silly film an R rating. Director Mark Sobel (who spent much of his career working in TV) pretty much throws everything at the wall and sees what sticks, and thankfully, things stick more often than not.
This could’ve worked as a sleazy exploitation flick about escaping white slavery, but it often pulls its punches in favor of the Indiana Jones-style Saturday Matinee last-minute rescues. The action also fluctuates wildly as some scenes feel like your generic DTV actioner while others feel like something out of a big budget production. (The extended helicopter raid looks like outtakes from Apocalypse Now.) The cheesy performance by Landau also kinda runs against the grain of Allen’s more serious take on the material.
Because of all this, the film never quite gels as a satisfying whole. You’d think the seventy-nine-minute running time would suit the material, but it's such a hodgepodge that it feels a lot longer due to fact the movie is constantly shifting between subgenres (and tone). Still, Sweet Revenge is sweet enough to make for an undemanding night of B Movie cheesiness.
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