Savaged

I recently watched Avenged (2013) on Prime. The storyline follows a def girl who is dragged into the desert and beaten, raped, murdered and buried. An Apache spirit helps her return to the world of the living to seek revenge.

This picture is directed by Michael S. Ojeda (The Russian Bride) and stars Amanda Adrienne Smith (Dreams of Solace), Marc Anthony Samuel (Say Uncle), Rodney Rowland (The Walking Dead), John Charles Meyer (The Millennium Bug).

This isn't a good movie, but I enjoyed it way more than I anticipated. The acting and dialogue are painfully bad, and the cinematography is inconsistent. The storyline is an obvious knockoff of "I Spit on Your Grave." However, the kill and gore are excellent. I loved the diverse methods the kills were executed. There's a great use of a pool stick that's a must see and fun use of human intestines. There's also a cool use of a muscle car.

In conclusion, Avenged is a fun revenge picture that isn't great but is worth a watch. I would score this a 5.5/10 and only recommend it if you're looking for something different.

Avenged is nothing more than a decent low budget revenge horror film. That's fine. I like this stuff. I don't even care if it's a ripoff of "I Spit on Your Grave," with Native American supernatural forces mixed in. I've always found that stuff to be hokey, but I'll go along for the ride. The story is quite familiar, but who cares, it's cheap horror. The characters are reasonably well developed for this genre, although the acting is spotty enough to knock the movie down a peg. The art direction is mostly good and the lighting is effective. The cinematography is fairly good most of the time, but too often, seriously betrays the film's low budget. The gore effects and CGI are good enough, considering. I could have enjoyed the movie and given it 4 stars for being above average and reasonably entertaining. But I'd bet my right eye that the 5 star reviews (9-10 stars on IMDb) are written by people with some connection to the filmmaker. This movie is just too flawed, in really big, obvious ways for that many people to love it that much. So watch it if you want, but I'd recommend lowering your expectation if you don't want to feel cheated at the end, as I and most of the honest reviewer were.

Sweet, deaf girl is randomly savaged to death by a bunch of desert yahoos. But the spirit of another victim revives her corpse, and the revenge is unstoppable.

Moral stuff really bores me and I don't much like revengers, but it's a good 'un. This time we get into over-the-top supernatural gore, with good style and sympathetic characters, plus touches of humour.

The story is the usual nonsense of suburban superior to rural (with a dose of US racial prejudice), but I liked almost everything – direction, editing, cinematog, pace & action, with a plot that winds up steadily. Some decent real-effect gore, restrained on the sex, scent of cheese on the CGI.

Acting is good, with the best line: "My, oh my – something dead has been living in here." Dialogue gets heavy in a bloated end sequence with lots of exposition. The only other drawback is the over-use of music – often perfect, but let me figure it out for myself.

Overall, a moral story so not a true horror, but well told.

This low-budget supernatural action horror film is proof that you don't need a billion dollars to make a good, enjoyable, and high-end movie - worth watching on the big screen...

I've watched the movie during the "Screamfest" horror film festival in LA, 2013, and although I had no expectations, I was surprised by the quality of the film...

Director Michael S. Ojeda has done beautiful work - with a wonderful little tale of revenge that turns epic, artistic shots and mise-en- scene, which fit perfectly in the slasher-genre, great actor-directing, fluent and precise editing, and excellent special effects...

In my opinion, having done most of the pre-production and post- production work on his own - definitely entitles Ojeda as being a new generation "Auteur-Director"...

The cast was awesome, each and everyone of them, and the producers have done great work - utilizing whatever budget they managed to scrape into making this slasher a great movie...

Story wise you're not going to get anything too exceptional, though the "touch" (or twist if you want to call it that), might be appealing to some. Other than that, you do have a lot of criticism, if you want to look at it that way, about America in general. Which is a bold move, considering that is the market this is supposed to make money in that country.

On the other hand, it's obvious that it tries to leave old thinking behind and is about tolerating. The whole "native" revenge thing is convoluted though, not that you'd expect a movie like this to make much sense anyway. The effects are pretty decent for a movie with a budget limitation as this one had.