A Face da Vingança

If you want a movie that's so bad it eventually entertains, this is the one for you. Starts pretty incoherently with odd thing happening after odd thing happening. Characters make ridiculous decisions and dismiss obvious red flags. As a viewer, I challenge you to discover if you are in England or America. Car and license plates - Europe. Lead character, British accent. Everyone else? American. Yet somehow the family's been there since 1863? Shrug. However, when the action finally starts it's so bad it's good. It's a direct rip off of "The Most Dangerous Game" complete with a Count Zaroff character. Enjoy.

As this film opens a man is held captive. He is tormented before his throat is cut and his blood drained into a bucket. The action then cuts to protagonist Erin; she has been invited for a weekend away with her boyfriend at his parent's remote house in the Scottish Highlands. On the way she learns that his brother and his girlfriend as well as his sister are to be there. When they arrive we see that his parents were the killers from the opening scene. It soon becomes apparent that the 'girlfriends' are intended to be the next victims. What they didn't reckon on was the fact that Erin was kidnapped before and now fuelled by perpetual rage she is more than a match for them.

This is not a great movie but if you are in the mood for trashy violence then it is rather fun. There aren't too many surprises; the opening scene lets us know the parents are murderous and we are soon informed of the reasons they want to blood. The only real question is how the various bad guys are going to die. The action is nicely varied and fairly bloody but unfortunately the fights don't feel real as we can see that blows come nowhere near hitting their target. The acting is okay; a bit of hamminess adds some unintended humour to proceedings. The setting is good although one would expect some of the characters to sound at least vaguely Scottish. Overall I'd say this is fun enough if you are in the mood for an hour and a half of trashy violence.

The critics are being too hard on this. It's a certain type of movie that you either mess with or you don't. I actually liked it! You can't go into something like this expecting a masterpiece and it was way better than expected. I mean maybe because I'm all for a woman kicking men's butts but I thought the fight scenes were pretty good for a low budget film and I liked the main characters back story. All except for the last couple of unbelievable deaths which got a bit campy, It was fun at the least. Nothing more to really say! I don't like that this thing is making me try and find things to say to meet the word requirement.

Beats me how they manage to raise the money to make films like this, it really does.

Most of the characters are supposed to be yanks, but that changes by the sentence.

The family settled in Scotland in the 1800s, but inexplicably don't even speak with a Scottish accent.

There's the token macho tough guy, who just has to display his oiled up biceps at all times, despite this being Scotland, and my god does it get cold up there!

There's also the preposterous storyline involving drinking blood to prolong life.

The heroine, an extremely scrawny and emaciated lady, somehow has superhuman strength.

For all these reasons this just ain't worth your time.

The way the movie started, I felt it might be a real loser. A man, clearly beaten, manages to escape his binds, and then gets into a fight with one of the captors. He manages to get a knife, but hesitates, which of course is a bad idea. It then switches to Adam picking up Erin to go to his parents house, which is very isolated. On the way, they pick up his brother Michael and Sarah. The parents seem a bit strange, and at dinner offer their special drink. Of course it is drugged, as the parents are in the business of harvesting blood, rich in adrenaline, which they get by terrorizing their captives. And they have apparently a basement full of captives. But it turns out Erin is not just some young woman. At age 4, she was kidnapped, tortured and abused for 15 years before she could make her escape. And her captors didn't fare well. There is plenty of gore, blood and killings which should satisfy most viewers. It is basically an action film to be accepted on that basis.