LET’S GET PHYSICAL: THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE (1973) ***

FORMAT:  4K UHD

ORIGINAL REVIEW:  

(As posted on July 17th, 2007)

If you ever wondered where Quentin Tarantino got the inspiration for the Daryl Hannah character in the Kill Bill movies, this is it.

Christina (Sex and Fury) Lindberg plays a young mute woman who is picked up by a stranger who drugs her, gets her addicted to heroin and forces her into a life of prostitution. When she claws her first customer’s face, he retaliates by slicing her eye open with a scalpel. She dons an eye patch (A different color to match her different outfits. This girl knows how to accessorize!) and slowly grows accustomed to her perverted customers. Luckily for her she gets one day off a week (!) which she uses to learn kung fu, take stunt driving lessons and proper firearm safety which she’ll later use for her elaborate slow motion revenge scheme.

This definitely isn’t one for the squeamish. The eye slicing scene is shown in glorious detail (an actual corpse was used!) and some of the sex scenes feature hardcore XXX penetration.

While the set-up has all the makings for the ultimate revenge film, the film loses its way during the final act once Lindberg actually starts to take her revenge. Director Bo A. Vibenius’ over reliance on slow motion pointlessly draws the film out and slows it down to a crawl when it should really be turning up the heat. (It makes a Peckinpah movie look like a hyper-edited MTV video.)

Still Lindberg’s performance and a generous helping of sleazy exploitation sex and violence still makes this one highly recommended.

AKA: They Call Her One Eye. AKA: Hooker’s Revenge. AKA: Thriller.

QUICK THOUGHTS:  

I hadn’t seen Thriller:  A Cruel Picture in a while, and I still found it to be very effective.  What makes it work is Vibenius’ matter of fact handling of Lindberg’s humiliation, degradation, and initiation into prostitution.  If he was already filling the movie with sleazy atmosphere, it would’ve been hard to take.  Plus, the sudden shift into hardcore territory wouldn’t have been so shocking either. 

I still say he went overboard on the slow-motion in the third act.  I know Vibenius wanted to milk the revenge portion of the film for all its worth and draw out the bad guys’ death, but it all borders on (pun intended) overkill.  I’m sure he was just riding on what Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah were doing.  It’s just that it becomes monotonous after a while.  I mean you could theoretically go and make yourself a sandwich at the beginning of the scene where Lindberg Kung Fus a couple of cops and by the time you come back, she’d still be karate chopping them.  Despite those quibbles, the film still is able to cement its rightful place as one of the gnarliest revenge flicks of all time. 

4K UHD NOTES:  

I’m not a 4K expert by any means, but as the year progresses, I’ll try to learn all the lingo and buzzwords the big boys use when they review these things.  As far as I’m concerned, this looked great.  Instead of touching the film up to make it look brand-spanking new, the folks at Vinegar Syndrome did their best to preserve the film to how it looked when it was originally screened.  They kept much of the grain in and on my 4K TV it looked probably the same it did on the grindhouse circuit on opening night.  Oh, and the eye-popping scene looked really… uh… eye popping in 4K.