By Nia Edwards-Behi
Despite being a big fan of films like Last House on the Left, Ms. 45, and, I Spit on Your Grave, I don’t actually actively seek out rape-revenge films. However, I do gravitate towards genre films with female protagonists, and lord knows they often enough end up being revenge narratives of some description anyway. So when a low-budget film with a title like Revenge Is Her Middle Name shows up, I figured I would surely enjoy some aspect of it, even if it did turn out to be the complete dross it sounded like. How wrong I was.
Kat is a down and out, drug-addicted prostitute and also a terrible person. She convinces her terrible boyfriend to steal money from her terrible pimp in order to have the funds to carry and raise her terrible baby. She kills her boyfriend, makes off with the money, and sort of tries to start a new life. Then her past catches up with her and she’s gang-raped. Then she does some things which seem to be included to pad out the running time, then, finally, she takes her bloody revenge. Then the film mercifully ends.
In order to try and be at least somewhat balanced, let me say there are occasionally some nicely composed shots in the film, usually making use of some nice lighting design. Aside from these few scenes, though, the film is consistently incompetent and a tedious viewing experience. The camera-work is all over the place, the editing not much better, and the sound recording so poor that, when combined with the shockingly bad performances, key scenes are often unintelligible. Not that it matters much – the narrative is so badly paced by the time anything important happens you’ll hopefully have stopped caring, if you cared at all. There is not one single character to root for in this film, which makes it very difficult to find any of the shouting and slapping and murdering going on remotely compelling. The film takes a slow 30 minutes to set up what could so easily have been done in 15, and considering it makes heavy use of tropes and stereotypes, it’s a wonder anyone would even bother taking that much time. Throughout the film, intertitles kindly inform us whenever some time has passed – be it 8 months or a few years – which is at least something of an on-screen acknowledgement that neither the story-telling nor the editing is going to be strong enough to convey that simple information to the audience.
It becomes quite quickly apparent that this is one of those films that’s going to drop naughty swear words and gross sex stuff into the proceedings at every given opportunity, presumably in an attempt to be shocking. Nothing is particularly shocking, though, given as it’s all so half-arsedly done that it feels like a teenage boy in the late 90s has stayed up late to look for porn but wasn’t brave enough to go further up the channel list than an erotic thriller on Channel 5. This is perhaps under-scored best by a brief interlude where some vintage porn is intercut into the film (and even at video quality that looks better than the rest of it), as well as through the credits. Why? Because boobs, I guess?
There’s probably more I could say about how the film makes some vague attempts are depicting trauma, very badly, and how it attempts to play with genre conventions, but ultimately it’s just so tedious it’s barely worth the effort. I had assumed I’d seen the worst rape-revenge film out there in the form of Savage Vengeance, the unofficial sequel to I Spit on Your Grave. Wrong again. At least that film had the decency to be only 65 minutes long, and has a really great bit with a chainsaw. Revenge Is Her Middle Name is just a monumental waste of time.
Revenge is Her Middle Name is available now on Region 1 DVD from Unearthed Films.