★★½
“How do you feel about forming a rape squad?”
By pure coincidence, I watched this the same day as Asking for It, and despite this being close to fifty years older and very, very dated, it’s still the superior movie. It ain’t great – or even good, to be clear. But as the poster suggests, it has no other aim than being a straightforward rabble-rousing group vigilante flick. Vengeance was released hot on the heels of Death Wish, which came out just a few weeks earlier in the summer of 1974. Here, Linda (Harris) is a victim of a serial rapist, who wears a hockey mask (six years before Jason in Friday the 13th) and makes his victims sing Jingle Bells (!).
‘The police are less than helpful, all but blaming her for the attack. However, when attending an identity line-up, Linda is able to meet other victims, and they band together to form a support group for women. Initially, this is through a phone helpline, accompanying victims to the police station, etc. They also take a self-defense class from a woman with a black belt in karate, Tiny (Lada Edmund Jr., who would go on to become, allegedly, the highest-paid stuntwoman in Hollywood). The women then escalate to taking direct action against a man who date-raped a woman, coating his dick in permanent blue dye (!!). But the group’s actions have drawn the attention of Mr. Hockey Mask.
His behaviour escalates as a result, attacking and strangling to death one of their friends, and he then begins targeting the squad specifically. He lures the women to an abandoned zoo – apparently, with some vague intention of pulling a five-for-one special, though the film is vague on the details. This is a bit of a problem throughout the film, with a number of points at which characters act in ways which are more necessary for the plot to happen, than in any way real people might behave. I’m also startled by the apparent complete lack of firearms in seventies America. Then there’s the film’s desire to be both empowering and sexy, e.g. the women plan their activities while lolling around topless in a hot-tub (!!! – and that’s enough exclamation points, I think).
Certainly, the assaults that pepper the early going in the film are likely more disturbing now, because they almost seem intended to be titillating – they are the reason why the film is still unavailable in the UK without cuts. The film is on better, and certainly more entertaining ground, when they are actively engaging with the enemy, such as a pimp roughing up one of his stable of women. There’s no moral ambiguity or depth to be found here: this is a bludgeon of a film, which likely would be unable to spell the word “subtlety.” It may be most effective as a time-capsule of the mid-seventies, and does showcase how society has probably improved since them – at least slightly.
Dir: Bob Kelljan
Star: Jo Ann Harris, Peter Brown, Jennifer Lee, Connie Strickland
a.k.a. Rape Squad