Rape is a Circle

Each copy of disc 4 of the Tomb of Terrors collection should be set on fire to spare anyone who has yet to watch it. Granted, I have yet to watch the last film on the disc, but given that Abberdine County Conjuror has a listed running time of a ponderously long 133 minutes, and has an IMDB rating of 1.7, I’m thinking it a safe bet to say that that won’t be the one to turn everything around.

The rape-revenge genre is a tricky business. Bad taste is frankly expected to go along with it, but thanks to an appropriate lack of general public interest in these films, bad production values and poor quality tend to go along with it as well. So where does this one rank on the very sliding scale of quality for the genre? Well, it goes somewhere below Night Train Murders, a film whose big claim to fame is being the most well-known open ripoff of Last House on the Left. This is not a good place to be.

The film follows three girls, two of whom are foreigners hitch-hiking in the U.S., and the third is a mad lesbian rapist and serial killer who drugs them and takes them back to her home for several days of torture and sexual deviancy. I guess the general mindset of this was that having a girl be the mad rapist torturer would be considered a shocking twist among people with no familiarity with the genre, but it’s really not that helpful, aside from ensuring that every major character in the film is a reasonably attractive woman (or at least a woman with a reasonably attractive body). In a presumed effort to show some level of artistry, she keeps playing with her naked Barbie dolls, showing what she plans to do to her captives, and re-enacting her seemingly unending list of childhood traumas, from being ostracized due to her gayness to being raped by what appears to have been every man she has ever met. Eventually, of course, the two girls escape, and have a tedious conversation about how they need to go back and stop her permanently, and the movie wraps up swiftly with the revenge part of the rape-revenge.

There’s quite a few problems with the film, which I’m sure stuns everyone reading this. For one, if the two girls are from Canada, why do they inexplicably say they’re from the far south? For that matter, why does the one girl have no accent whatsoever, while the other one seems to be trying for a Russian accent? Why is all the dialogue written and spoken like this was intended to be a dom-sub porno? What self-respecting writer-director would want his or her name listed in the credits as Bill Zebub? Who approved that dreadful music, with a girl trying to sound like a low-rent Kate Bush singing over borderline elevator muzak? How can there be so damn many continuity glitches in a one hour film that has virtually no plot to speak of? Why am I still watching these movies, despite how terrible they are?

That last one, unfortunately, I don’t know that I’ll ever get an answer for.

Rating: Zero stars