Savaged

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.

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.

A girl driving out in th CA desert, oh she's at the Grand Canyon! I lvoe the Grand Canyon! Weird tho because after they show a Grand Canyon sign I can still tell she's driving in CA. Ruh roh and after she witnesses a guy being rundown, she helps him into her car. But the hit and runners come back and turn that hit and run into a murder.

Wow, and that one dude is a heck of a shot at long distance with a pistol. The men scoop her up and take her to a house. And it appears they take some time for a bit of rape. Oh I just noticed this movie had a title change. Well that's a minus right there. We don't like title changes.

And it's a shame, because the bad men kill the poor deaf girl. Oh seriously she lived? Oh well there's one of those unbelievable plot points. Oh no. And then apparently a spirit comes back to possess her body? So confusing!

LOL okay when she guts the cop, that was fun. +1 Star. Oh and the close up archery? +1 Star!

And really at this point we're back at a 5/10. The rest of the movie, including the end, is a bunch of violence that really gets kind of boring since you know how it is going to end.

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.

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.