Product: Day of the Woman (1978)
Rating: 3.0
Revenge is a dish best served cold...
The premise of this film is great and simple: revenge. While not original, it still has merits. It's probably been used more times as a plot element throughout human history than anything except love. To elaborate a bit, the plot revolves around a woman who is viciously raped by a gang of depraved locals while on a summer retreat from NY City to work on a novel in a small country town. But a great premise alone does not make a good film.The foundation (its premise) is the only thing this film has going for itself. The acting is extremely bad (amateurish would be a too kind), especially considering the lame dialogue, the pacing of the movie excruciatingly slow, and you can find better examples of cinematography on YouTube.Did I mention the acting is bad? The acting is bad by any standard. I've seen better acting by porn stars - see Sasha Grey and Traci Lords. I've seen better acting IN a porn movie. No wait... I've seen better acting by a cereal box in a commercial. If the corpse of Laurence Olivier were to be disinterred and put in a film, it would have better screen presence than all of the actors in this film combined. The acting is atrocious. The rape scenes, while graphic, are completely unbelievable, comical, in fact. My brain was confused. I didn't know whether to be shocked or laugh at the acting of the men. A film like this, as with many others, relies on the "suspension of disbelief." If you can't convince the audience that what their watching is plausible, then you'll most likely lose them.Not only was the acting horrible, but the characters were utterly stereotypical, painfully so. The villains consist of a group of degenerate country locals: the leader, a few cronies, and the town idiot. The town idiot was particularly annoying! I couldn't help but think of "Scary Movie" and Officer Doofy[...]Another complaint is the pacing. The film takes entirely too long to setup the plot. It was a wasted effort. It seems like nearly half of the film is wasted waiting for the rape scene. The characters are so "flat" and one-dimensional that it can't be argued that the pacing of the film is being used to develop the characters. And the character dialogue is so boring that it only causes the film to drag along at the pace of a bike rider at a NASCAR event. There's nothing intriguing or captivating about the dialogue. There's nothing to hold you - no effort is made to interest the viewer in the main character or give insight into the villains or anything worthwhile.What do I like about the film, you are probably asking - besides the aforementioned premise? I honestly loved the main character. I loved the revenge she took out on her attackers - and it is brutal!!! She basically uses guerrilla tactics to overcome a stronger and more numerous enemy. She divides and conquers. She uses fear, uncertainty, weakness, distraction, and concern over each other to lure her enemies in and eliminate them. The second half of the film actually makes watching it worth the experience.The film is shocking, no doubt, but I've seen worse. I'm a horror film fan and, generally, not a big fan of torture porn, which is what I'd say best describes this film. In fact, I'd say it helped to spawn the whole genre. It's worth watching once, but I can't say I'd ever watch it again. I'm actually now looking forward to the remake, which will come out this year. I suspect that the issues that I had will be cleaned up in the remake, including the pacing, dialogue, acting, characterization, etc. It might be one of the rare instances in which the remake is better than the original. But one thing that it probably won't "one-up" the original is impact that the film itself had. The original caused a great deal of scandal, and was, in fact, banned in many countries. Whether or not the remake will live up to the original... well, we'll see.