Director: Meir Zarchi
Year Released: 1980
Rating: 0.5
Buster Keaton's granddaughter gets raped in an excruciating 40-minute torture sequence, then enacts revenge against the four perpetrators (after, naturally, praying at a church for God's guidance). Although it deserves credit for showing the act of rape as being both abhorrent and non-sexual where so many films do not (A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs, The Devils), I couldn't stop wondering why bother showing it at all, or, more importantly, why create an entire film to document exactly how awful such an assault is? Had Zarchi actually had some sort of intent in carrying on with the graphic display - some philosophical or intellectual reason - you could at least understand the motives, but when all we're given is the victim praying at a church and then turning into some sort of avenging angel, or Joan of Arc type, a new form of woman created from the oppressed "former" type of woman, it's hard not to find the whole endeavor foolish and ignorant. At the very least, Zarchi could have had 'real' actors with 'real' dialogue and, perhaps, a 'real' story to contain the sickness. The result is a nasty debacle, somewhere in the same film pool as Last House on the Left.
