Review by Ben Bussey
Whilst it may be a dish best served cold, revenge has been pretty damned hot in indie filmmaking in recent years. Pretty much any neo-grindhouse movie to have come along since Rodriguez and Tarantino set that particular ball rolling has featured at least one lone survivor with a serious score to settle. More often than not these movies have also taken place in an arid desert setting, and in most instances vintage muscle cars, strip clubs and hard drug use wind up playing a key role. Every one of these boxes is ticked by Ravi Dhar’s directorial debut Vengeance Road (quite why it was decided to ditch the rather cooler original title American Muscle for the UK is beyond me), and as such it’s inevitable that the movie carries more than a slight sense of been-there done-that. However, if you stick with it you may find it doesn’t wind up following quite the path you think it will.
John Falcon (Nick Principe) is a bad-ass motherfucker who we meet just as he’s released from a decade in the big house, and we quickly learn he doesn’t expect to be out, or possibly even alive, for a particularly long time. As soon as he manages to get back to his old stomping ground (by way of a convertible-driving cougar kind enough to give him a ride, in both senses), John immediately sets about finding and killing each and every member of his old crew – and the big name at the end of the list is his own brother Sam (Todd Farmer). Quite what went down ten years earlier is not entirely clear at first, but as John’s quest for bloody retribution proceeds, we’re granted more glimpses of the job that went wrong in flashback. But as much as John’s motivation is to get back at the former friends who fucked him over, there’s one faint light at the end of the tunnel: his estranged wife Darling (Robin Sydney), a drug addict whose troubles would seem to have inadvertently sent John down the criminal path in the first place. John’s mission would seem straightforward enough – kill the bad guys, get the girl – but it soon transpires things might not be quite that simple.
The casting of Todd Farmer in the key villain role is an interesting move. As the screenwriter behind Jason X, the My Bloody Valentine remake and – most notably for our purposes here – the enormously underrated Drive Angry, he’s most recognisable from his cameos in those movies. With the whole recently liberated convict out for blood with a gun and a muscle car angle, there are clear echoes of Drive Angry to be found in Vengeance Road – but one thing this movie has which really works to its advantage is a lead actor who genuinely looks capable of the things we see him do (sorry, Nic Cage, you know we love you). A 6′ 7″ skinhead covered in tattoos and a long way from conventional leading man handsome, Nick Principe – best known to some of us as the dude behind the Chromeskull mask in the Laid To Rest movies, and most recently seen in Seed 2 – is pretty much what you expect to see if you look up “someone you don’t want to run into down a dark alley” in a dictionary. Casting such a dude as the hero – even an anti-hero like this one – is a ballsy move, and happily it really pays off. An even more pleasant surprise is that Principe proves a bit more versatile an actor than we might anticipate: whilst he comes off every inch the unstoppable killing machine from the get-go, there are moments of vulnerability which are handled surprisingly well.
Also surprising is how seriously the film handles the subject of drug addiction. Again, drug use is pretty much a given in these retro-exploitation movies – after all, most of them seem custom designed for an audience already under the influence, and Vengeance Road is no exception, as evidenced by the psychedelic overtones, lurid visuals, plentiful nudity and moments of outright weirdness (look no further than the final seconds of the trailer below for evidence of this). It’s not surprising that the cover art highlights Malice McMunn as gang girl Sassy Fanny; as a heavily inked Suicide Girl type with a giant mohawk and no readily apparent hang ups about being naked, she’s a striking and memorable presence for sure. However, Robin Sydney deserves particular praise for her turn as Darling, taking what initially seems a fairly standard damsel-in-distress role but delving deeper into shades of grey, asking realistic questions about just how easily such a person can really be ‘rescued.’ Sure, both the actress and director milk it for maximum sex appeal, with countless sultry scantily clad shots flashing up from John’s memory – but these ultimately stand to highlight the contrast between his idealised recollections of what was, and the ugly reality that these characters truly face. (Credit is of course also due here to writer John Fallon, who also co-stars – and I can’t help but love that he all but named the hero after himself.)
In short, Vengeance Road does what so few neo-grindhouse movies manage: it delivers all the old school sleaze you hope to see, but doesn’t neglect to tell a well-rounded story in an intelligent way. Perhaps it suffers slightly from its low production values, and I know I won’t be alone in wishing it hadn’t been so reliant on CG gore, but all things considered this is definitely one of the better films of its kind that we’ve seen recently. I doubt it’ll do anything to change your mind if you’re not already a fan of the new grindhouse, but otherwise this it’s well worth giving a shot.
Vengeance Road is released on Region 2 DVD on 5th January 2015 from Metrodome.