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STUDIO: Breaking Glass Pictures
MSRP: $21.99
RATED: Not Rated
RUNNING TIME: 86 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
Nothing
The Pitch
Catholic School Girls get raped. Later, they take revenge.
The Humans
Peter Tahoe, Christina DeRosa and Cheryl Lyone
The Nutshell
Catherine and Rebecca are going door to door selling religious items. They’re just two Catholic School girls who just want to raise a little extra cash for their school. One day, they knock on the door of this weird brothel/crackhouse on the edge of town. The girls get raped and beaten up. Catherine manages to escape, only to end up at a local hospital. Eventually, she wakes up as a badass mute avenger.
The Lowdown
Director Joseph Guzman knows how to shoot naked chicks and insane gore. But, the constraints of a micro budget kill most of his attempts at grandiose moments. Still, Guzman works with his creative team to make a rather well-developed film. The actors are a decent bunch who keep you in the feel of the picture. Plus, the film actually takes found locations and makes them work as period touchstones.
Run Bitch Run works as yet another entry into the Post Modern exploitation genre. But, it rises above competitors by feeling closer to a period movie. The closest comparison I have would be the tone of the Filipino Exploitation flicks of the early to mid 1970s. Eddie Romero was king here and I get a bit of his style in Guzman’s work. Victimization is so abstract, yet becomes real when placed onscreen. But, it requires an extra something.
When Catherine escapes the hospital and begins her revenge, you see something in her face. The first fifteen minutes of the film have worked as a careful deconstruction of the innocent school girl. When she is attacked, you feel it. She can’t escape, she has no idea where she is. Is there gore? Sure, but it doesn’t get in the way. Part of the torture porn backlash has been from the film snobs dissecting gore vs. horror.
While gore is the death of true horror, it helps to accentuate a point. The naive Catherine is forced to endure many terrible sights before and after her attack. One of the main villains masturbates on a toilet with a plunger. Sure, Catherine’s later efforts lead a machete towards a guy’s rectum. But, let’s just take a look at what I just said. Plunger fucking and ass stabbing. The film’s pretty hardcore.
When you get around the over-the-top elements of the film, you’ve got nothing. Exploitation revenge movies exist as rollercoaster rides into the fucking bizarre. The only person to really break out of this was Tarantino with his Kill Bill and Grindhouse offerings. Speaking of Tarantino, I still don’t get why Guzman slapped Catherine in that damn nurse outfit. A forgotten visual trope from Dead and Buried that was novel in its Kill Bill reuse. Now every neophyte junk cinema fan will automatically associate it back to Elle Driver. It makes it kind of hard for your film to develop its identity.
In
the end, the film does what it needs to do and nothing more. Could you find a better B-movie by digging through Netflix or Amazon? Sure, but it’s nice to see that an independent filmmaker can produce something as creative as this. There’s so many modern filmmakers that just crap out the same ol’ schlock and expect it to be on par with past masters. What Guzman has done is show the promise of a young Zarchi. I look forward to his next flick. The title is Nude Nuns with Big Guns and it’s arriving in 2010.
The Package
The
DVD
only contains the film. The disc I screened seemed to be an early preview copy that was in desperate need of a remastering. The transfer was dirty as hell and barely above VHS quality. That might’ve been the aesthetic that the director was trying to establish. But, it doesn’t work when you can’t tell what’s going on during darker scenes.