EVEN LAMBS HAVE TEETH

Canada, 2015, 78 minutes, Colour.
Kirsten Prout, Tiera Skovbye.
Directed by Terry Miles.

This is a horror vengeance film in the tradition of films from the 1980s, especially like I Spit on Your Grave, where women are brutally treated, rape, physical violence, verbal abuse, are intended to be murder victims.

Some have considered that the film is the equivalent of the torture porn of so many films of the early 21st century – in the Hostel vein.

The film starts ambiguously with a group of young adults daring each other to take drugs and having hallucinatory experiences. One of the young women urges her rather reticent friend to take the drug – which she does.

Then a transition of mood as the two girls say goodbye to the uncle of the seemingly resistant young woman – and he is an FBI detective. Their intention is to work on an organic farm, get enough money to go to New York for a spending spree!

They stop at a shop, meet two agreeable young men who give them a lift – take them to see their mother who drugs them and they are installed in two huts as prostitutes for the police inspector and other men of the district. They are subjugated to sexual attack and brutal treatment by brutal men.

They have a code to send the uncle and it is broken so he becomes suspicious and goes investigating, little knowing that the police chief is one of the main participants in the abuse.

However, the reluctant girl (the rather fearless one becoming extraordinarily timid) gets free after biting a man in the neck – and they go on a vengeance spree, calling at the local hardware shop, getting all kinds of weapons, systematically pursuing the men who abuse them, the sheriff, the mother, the two sons, relishing their revenge which is understandable but ugly to watch.

The initially reluctant girI is airly shrewd and make it look as if the younger son did all the killings and then killed himself – some of the victims have offered money which the girls have taken and the end of the film is their taking off for New York that spending spree.

In some ways this is a feminist film – but the visuals and the relishing of the revenge is sometimes too much.