By Richard Winters
My Rating: 5 out of 10
4-Word Review: Lawyer uncovers town’s secret.
Asta (Deborra-Lee Furness) is enjoying her vacation holiday from work as a lawyer by traveling through the Western Australian countryside on her motorbike only to get into an unexpected accident late one night when she inadvertently drives into a flock of sheep in the road that due to the darkness she didn’t see. With her bike now damaged she brings it into a repair shop run by Tim (Tony Barry). Since the parts for the bike need to be shipped in Asta agrees to stay at Tim’s residence in a spare room. It is there that she overhears a conversation involving Tim’s daughter Lizzie (Simone Buchanan) and her sexual assault by a group of young men at the town’s bar. No one seems to want to press any charges and everyone in the town places the blame on Lizzie by openly implying that she’s a ‘slut’, but Asta gives her the confidence to go to the police and press charges only to find that those same men are now after her and consider her to be their next ‘conquest’.
The film is loosely based on a true story, that also inspired The Accused, which starred Jodie Foster. However, here the approach is different where the rape victim isn’t the main protagonist, but instead someone who wasn’t even involved in the actual incident and mainly just stands on the sidelines as an observer, which isn’t as compelling. The Asta character almost becomes like a transparent ghost who’s always in the middle of the action, but overall doesn’t really do much to help propel the story along. The producers had wanted Asta to be more violent and vigilante-like, but the director nixed this idea even though I felt it would’ve helped.
While I liked the segments dealing with the parents of the boys who committed the rape and their denial of what happened and at one point even agreeing to pay-off the victim’s family not to press charges, as it’s interesting to see things from the family of accused, which most rape movies don’t do, but overall I found the story structure to be lackadaisical. I was a bit confused during the first act about what had occurred as everything is handled in a subtle and conversational fashion. We never see the actual crime happen it’s just spoken about in passing, but I felt at some point there should’ve been a flashback to the build-up of it and I was fully expecting it to come along at some point, but it never does.
The characterizations of the males is too extreme and stereotyped. I’m okay with some of the men being bad apples, as this can occur anywhere, but in this movie they’re all portrayed as being leering savage animals with no conscience or self-control. The fact that they’ve apparently raped other women in the town the same way just made it all the more over-the-top. I’ve never heard of small towns dealing with marauding, serial rape gangs and wondered what made this one so special. Was it something in the water?
There is a certain Mad Max vibe to it, which was apparently what the filmmakers were aiming for, but the results are only so-so. At least in Mad Max it had a surreal, futuristic setting, but this thing has extreme behavior happening amongst the men in an average place in the modern-day, which didn’t make much sense.
My Rating: 5 out of 10
Released: February 26, 1988
Runtime: 1 Hour 31 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Steve Jodrell
Studio: Barron Films
Available: DVD, Amazon Video
Scopophilia 