LUST FOR VENGEANCE

I enjoyed Sean Weathers directorial debut, House of the Damned. It was a decidedly entertaining chunk of mayhem that promised great things for the maverick director. Imagine my anticipation then when Weathers claimed to pay homage to classic 1960s giallo with 2001’s LUST FOR VENGENCE.

Weathers sets the viewer up nicely for a retro viewing experience with a written claim in the opening frames stating that this is the first EVER giallo to be made in the USA. He also alludes to an antiquated method used in cinema whereby movies had three separate sequences for each reel of film. He uses five in LFV – one for each character.

Our narrative begins with the names of 5 girls being scrawled on a piece of paper under the heading "PAYBACK". A quick murder follows leaving four lifelong friends, Stephanie, Beth, Anna and Lisa distraught. After hearing the tragic news that that their friend Jennifer Lopez(!!) has been murdered, panic ensues. It seems the ‘mystery’ killer disapproves of the girls hedonistic lifestyles which are filled with copious amounts of drugs and wanton sex. As such, the murderer seeks to subject them to their own form of extreme justice. Shot in a nonlinear style, the narrative doesn’t follow a time line, instead opting to focus on each of the characters depraved behaviour before seeing them eliminated. Will the girls curb their reckless lifestyles in order to save themselves, or will the killer complete his list of names...?

I found watching this pretty arduous I have to say. For a start the picture quality is completely substandard. Imagine jerky CCTV footage before the digital age with different coloured hues laid over it. The two tone colours may have seemed like a good idea to give the movie a bit of vintage elegance, but in truth it simply looked blurred.

Even if the movie had digital clarity, I still don’t think it would be up to much. I appreciate there is a legion of no budget trash that does have somewhat of a cult following so I don’t wish to dwell on the lack of gloss. My main gripe is with the fact the movie is being marketed as a stylish giallo. Take the title for example. Lust for Vengeance hardly contains the enigmatic mystery of ‘Death laid an Egg’, ‘Five Dolls for an August Moon’, ‘The House with Laughing Windows’ etc. But one thing the title DID get right was the ‘Lust’ part! Unfortunately, the crass sex scenes that padded out the 72 minute runtime (thankfully not the 85 minutes advertised on the cover!), had very little eroticism to them. They were simply minutes tedious humping, if the concept of ‘tedious humping’ actually exists of course!

It doesn’t fare any better in its execution of violent set pieces. Yes the killer was clad in clichéd black motorbike leathers topped with opaque helmet, but they seriously lacked any creative panache. Not only were the killings bereft of any blood, which in itself may have been forgivable, they were just solitary stabs in the general direction of the victim which appeared extremely unconvincing at best.

The DVD cover notes also boasted about gratuitous drug taking and to be fair, there were a plethora of scenes featuring substance abuse. But even some of those were laughable, especially when one of the girls completely misses the white powdery line and instead uses the bottom of her dollar bill to knock it off the edge of the mirror!!! Finally, the revelation of the killer was more akin to Shaggy and Scooby than Argento or Bava and had all the surprise of a paper hat falling out of a Christmas cracker. Not good!

It’s a weird one really as Weathers clearly knows his giallo, accentuated by the podcast included on the DVD. Maybe he believed this raw style of movie would establish ‘ghetto giallo’ as a contemporary genre but I personally found it a huge disappointment.

It was rather disturbing to read that a couple of years after making this film, Weathers suffered a mental breakdown even flirting with suicide. After coming through these dark days, the director was quoted in a magazine interview as saying "I didn't feel that I was worthy of life. I wasn't the film maker that I wanted to be. I wasn't the human being that I wanted to be..." Now don’t get me wrong: the movie is not SO bad that its creator should end it all! But, Weathers clearly has talent and really should be making MUCH better pictures then the extremely inadequate LUST FOR VENGEANCE. Here’s hoping for better times for Weathers and, as a result, better movies.

Review by Marc Lissenburg