★★½
“Home of the hits”
“I realized that there was no such thing as a boundary between good or evil, black and white, right or wrong. All I learned is that this world is divided by the executed and executioners.” The above is spoken by a character toward the end of this, and explains the significance of the title, though your mileage may vary as to how convincing it is as an explanation. Four young women go to a country house by a lake, which holds dark memories for one of them. Belle (Dallender, known here from I Spit on Your Grave 2) watched her father die of a heart attack there, after he rescued her from drowning, and has been plagued by guilt ever since. There’s also Kay (Burn), a writer who is working on a “story of home invasion, mixed with supernatural elements.” And, wouldn’t you know it? Barely has the trip started, before three men burst in and take the group hostage.
There then follows some fairly nasty brutality and sexual violence, which seems especially dubious since the director has made energetic (and, let’s be honest, not unsuccessful) efforts to sexualize the attractive women – both before, and even more questionably, after that scene. The victims continue wandering round in their underwear for no good reason, when any real person would have quickly reached for their clothes. However, the tables are turned, with the three attackers turning out to be a bit crap at the whole home-invasion thing. With them tied up, it’s time for the quartet to mete out their own brand of justice – something which Belle, especially, is very keen to do.
This is where things get at least somewhat interesting, and rather meta. For it turns out the home invaders were not acting on their own initiative. They had been hired to attack the house, by person or persons then unknown, and were live-streaming their actions through bodycams back to their employer. Who is lurking in the woods nearby, and may or may not be ready to intervene on behalf of their employees. The scripting in this section is mediocre: one woman’s break for help and fate is so rapidly glossed-over as to be inconsequential, and one of the attacker becomes an ally with little more than “I’m gonna trust you with a gun. Remember, we’re not the enemy.”
As the poster suggests, Serafini is going for the grindhouse aesthetic. I’m just not sure how well he nails this. The nasty and repellent elements, he seems to have a good handle on, and Dallender impresses in her role. Yet the films in that field which have stood the test of time offer more than that, and it’s there where the film seems to fall short most obviously, with this likely making little or no lasting impression. The eventual explanation raises more questions than it answers, and doesn’t appear to make a great deal of logical sense. If you like your meat raw and bloody, this one may be more to your taste than it was to mine. If only they’d named all the characters after Disney princesses.
Dir: Giorgio Serafini
Star: Natalie Burn, Jemma Dallender, Rachel Rosenstein, Anna Shields