Savaged (2013)

Young deaf-mute girl goes on a roadtrip in the New Mexico desert before she moves in with her boyfriend and ends up being a witness to a group of racist rednecks murdering two native american men. They proceed to rape and torture her before finally deciding to finish her off and burying her alive but her nearly dead body is found by a shaman who performs a ritual that binds her soul to the spirit of a very angry native american warrior. Now she is back from the dead and pretty fucking angry.

Normally I really don't care for rape/revenge movies but decided to give Savaged a spin after reading a couple of positive reviews online and realizing that it had a supernatural element (I am a sucker for any horror based on native american myths and stories). I'm really glad I did. Yes, it starts out pretty nasty with the raping and the torturing but it really isn't dwelled on in any lenghty detail. It's when the girl comes back from the dead when the fun really begins as she goes on a gory rampage, killing the rednecks one by one while slowly turning into a bloody mess.

While some of the special effects aren't very special (in particular a visual effect concerning a toppling car) the rest of the movie is quite good. Amanda Adrienne is not a very imposing figure, very thin and slender, but she comes off really well as a woman possessed by an angry spirit and the makeup of her slowly rotting and damaged body is excellent. The rest of the cast have roles that doesn't require them to do much more than to be as repulsive as possible (the filmmakers work overtime reminding you that these people deserve everything that is done to them - and more) but they are all in on it, making you giggle with joy as they are disposed of with tender love and gore. And gore is what you get here, decapitations and disembowelements galore. The tone of the movie does turn slightly less serious as the vengeance starts going down but I think that's why I enjoyed this movie so much, it isn't as depraved as I expected it to be. Instead of a dark and depraved thriller we get a ghoulishly messy supernatural horror (with a nice and sad little love story included) and we need more of those.

In short: Fun and gory horror that was way more fun than I expected. Recommended.