Revenge (2018)
Oh, dear. Why is it whenever a director wants to make a controversial, boundary challenging and confronting film, they cleave to precisely the same format? Take a beautiful woman. Deposit her in an isolated location. Surround her by deviant, thirsty men. Have them rape her. Have her survive and exact bloody revenge. I call shotgun! This was the formula used back in 1978 for I Spit On Your Grave and (with slight alterations in the plot, allowing others to avenge the violation) Wes Craven's Last House on the Left (1972) and its original source, The Virgin Spring (1960) by Bergman; and probably further and further back. Sex and cinema have gone hand in hand since the first moving images were captured, and there is inevitably a point where the male gaze becomes the male touch. But those films were, in their way, transgressive and had purpose - at least sufficient justification to sustain a beery argument. Even I Spit On Your Grave , in spite of its flaws (and there are...