Julia

This has been done before, and better, as with I Spit on Your Grave. Julia(Ashley Williams) seen earlier in the even more bloody Human Centipede, gives a decent performance in the otherwise tedious, dark, and poorly written Juila. It begins with our heroine wearing ugly, oversized glasses walking up the stairs to an apartment for a date with a fellow intern from a nearby New York City hospital. He gives her a drink, which of course is spiked with something to knock out the young lady. Through a series of flashbacks, we are shown her assault by five very angry young men. She overhears a conversation at a seedy bar by women recovering from rape. Of course she pursues them and eventually gets her revenge on her culprits. The movie drags on for ninety five minutes and is a waste of time.

6.5 of 10. While the Saw films accomplished the same modern-day, reality-based blood and gore, the extremes and contraptions involved took a willingness to fantasize to believe something like that could happen. With Julia, there's no need for imagination or fantasy and nearly everything that's left to imagination in other films is visualized on screen.

Amongst other parts of it to enjoy are the soundtrack integration and the focus of the film. It doesn't try to be something more or imply something other than what the story is about.

What's missing seems to be pacing and acting and a few unedited non-sequiturs. Otherwise, you get a goth/emo-chick horror with some mystery without suffering through make believe monsters or heroes.

Let me first state that I am completely taken aback by a comment/review that states that men have nothing better to do than rape women (socially-wise) when they meet up. That's putting it in a nutshell, which is still just plain wrong on many different levels. I'm not a fan of the "genre" (if you can call it that), but this movie tries to put some other layers to the whole thing (not that they all work out perfectly, quite the opposite).

But the movie has some strong points (even things I don't agree with) and takes a bit of different path as to what you would expect. It kind of mixes another factor into the whole revenge thing. Not worked out perfectly and the one thing I do wholly agree with the other reviewer is that "American Mary" is far superior. But it wouldn't be fair to judge this movie like that. The technical aspect might not be up to speed with other productions, but this is low budget, no matter how much globalization has evolved ...

'Julia' is a film, which covers the genre of rape and revenge by portraying the story through the mind of the victim. Ashley Williams delivers a stirring performance as a timid woman who is brutally attacked and finds herself trying to recover by joining a violent cult. This movie is strange but innovative which is hard to watch at times yet it's dark and disturbing atmosphere adds to the shocking nature of the story. Many people who have slated this film as a cheap rip off of 'I spit on your grave' have not understood what it is showing and how it is different. This film does not focus on revenge itself but instead on the loss of control driven by the madness and fury within the mind of the victim. The film is extremely explicit and it is meant to be so that the viewer enters the mind of 'Julia Shames' and shares in her need for revenge.

Ghost Whisperer meets the Devil.

Revenge movies are always unpleasant to watch. But Julia has an underbelly that is dark.

On the surface it's just another revenge story, but beneath that is the occult, Julia's helpers are more like demons than people.

They take her in her weakness and turn her into one of them.

She goes from destroyed, to destroyer.

She becomes like the devil, stealing men away from life.

If you look at these mentors as the symbols of demons, and not human, as they appear to be, this movie really takes shape.