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.

I usually try not to compare one movie to another in a review. After having seen so many movies it becomes too easy and every review would be a comparison to one or more other movies. With that said, I have to compare this movie to "I Spit On Your Grave" due to the overwhelming similarity. If you've seen "I Spit On Your Grave" then you've seen a much better version of "Avenged." "Avenged" stars Amanda Adrienne playing Zoe, a deaf young lady crossing the country to live with her fiancée. On the road to her final destination she was brutally attacked by a group of raging racists. They thought she was dead until they were facing her wrath.

Who doesn't love a good tale of revenge? There's little better than seeing an oppressed person having the last laugh. We got to see that here but not without some flaws. Where this movie fell short was with making the antagonists so extremely bigoted and ignorant that they attacked and killed with total disregard and not the least bit of fear of the law. I don't doubt that such people exist, but these inbred yokels actually saved souvenirs of their purging the Earth of "squaws" and "Apaches".

Of course I wanted them dead as much as the next guy, but what message is the movie really sending when their undoing comes at the hands of a wronged white woman? Not one of the many Native Indians assailed by this band of bigots could have exacted revenge? Were their deaths not worthy of a merciless vengeance?

To further emphasize or garner more sympathy for Zoe's plight, she was deaf and she was engaged to a Black man. So, we witnessed a troop of trash viciously assault a pretty, young, white woman that was also handicapped. How evil must you be? And her engagement to a man of color allowed us to hear the visceral hate they had towards Blacks as they maliciously called her beloved the "N" word. As if to convey: if you didn't think they were insanely racist before when they were killing Native Indians, listen to how much they hate Black people.

Even with these exaggerations I enjoyed the movie. Amanda Adrienne did an excellent job. She played a deaf person so well I had to look her up to find out if she really was deaf. Even the method in which she spoke when she tried to speak was that of a deaf person. I can appreciate a movie being bold enough to star a deaf character. It's rare, it's risky and it worked.

From seeing the trailer of this film I thought it was going to be one of those fun slasher gore films. In a way it was but it could have had more of that stuff in it. To me this film was like a knock off of "The Crow", "I Spit On Your Grave", and a little "Kill Bill". With that being said, it did have it's own little twists that set it apart from others in it's genre. One thing that set it apart from the other films like it was the high drama content written in it. The relationship between Zoe (Amanda Adrienne) and Dane (Marc Anthony Samuel) played a big part in making this film what it was and I liked that. If this film just had a little more action, slashing, and gore in it I think it would have been almost perfect.

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...

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.