Fantasia 2020: For The Sake of Vicious

I’m aware that all the good movie titles, like all the good band names, have been taken. But For The Sake Of Vicious (2020) is as clumsy a name as any I’ve heard. It has no particular relevance to the film – at least not to the point where it was necessary – and is surely going to put some people off. I’m always suspicious of retitled movies, but this one is almost begging a distributor to slap some generic horror title on it.

I’ll be honest here – while this film starts off at a pace, my heart rather sank as the plot unfolded. A nurse, Romina (Lora Burke), arrives home from a Halloween night shift to find a beaten, unconscious man and his attacker in her house. The attacker is Chris (Nick Smyth), the father of a child whom his captive Alan (Colin Paradine) allegedly raped five years earlier. Romina finds herself being pulled into Chris’s revenge trip against a man who may or may not be guilty of the crime that he was acquitted for, and after twenty minutes or so, it feels as though we’ve been here before in films like Big Bad Wolves, or – if we want to go back to 1971 – the British film Revenge. Here, we immediately have too many cliched elements that we’ve seen already – the man driven insane by a need for justice (or perhaps to divert blame from his own crime), the victim who may or may not be a monster (the more reasonable he seems, the more likely it is that he is guilty, right?) and the woman who is the voice of reason, but who is also rather easily manipulated by a man who broke into her home with someone whom he has been torturing. But her trust is constantly shifting – there are problems with Chris’s story, Alan has too many answers for his questions, and his attacker seems too driven by insanity to be able to see the truth.

At this stage, the film seems to be an efficient but not especially interesting rehash of ideas that we’ve seen before, and you think that you can see where this will go – a series of doubts and double bluffs before we are finally shown the truth – and you can even guess what that truth would be, because those earlier films – while exploring the dubious nature of vigilantism and false accusation – eventually end up in the Death Wish tradition, suggesting that the vigilantes were right all along. But just as we seem to settling into this familiar territory, For the Sake of Vicious suddenly twists into another direction. We might be getting into spoiler territory here, given that the shift happens some forty minutes in, so those of you worried about such things might want to skip the rest of this review.

Romina allows Alan to make a phone call. We see a mysterious figure in a biker bar answer, and two masked figures show up to the house shortly afterwards, as Chris is torturing the hell out of his victim, in a scene that packs a real bunch in terms of brutal intensity and out-of-control mania. But they are not here to rescue Alan, and things start to get very odd immediately, as Chris is forced to defend himself, Romina and – by default – Alan from these invaders. This he does rather well, but these three home invaders are just the first wave of a biker army – the Splitting Skulls – who descend en masse.

The film’s shift in tone – from intense torture horror to ultra-violent home invasion action movie – is what ultimately saves it. In a sense, the opening half of the film is a tease, aimed at misdirecting us from what is to come, and once the film kicks in, it’s a fairly relentless and extraordinarily brutal affair that takes all our expectations and messes with them. Admittedly, the biker gang seem remarkably ineffectual at dealing with just three people, one of whom has already been crippled – and unless Chris is some sort of special forces action man, his ability to off multiple attackers is a bit much. This is the sort of film where people can virtually shrug off crippling injuries – multiple stab wounds to the stomach, a claw hammer embedded in the eye – to carry on fighting. It’s a shame, because there is, otherwise, a genuine intensity and savagery to the attacks, which are painfully intimate and ferociously gory – throats are slit, heads are crushed, limbs are snapped, all in loving detail.

There are some interesting performances – Paradine keeps you guessing, while Smyth is suitably psychotic, perhaps too much early on but more impressively as things develop. Burke, unfortunately, feels like the weak link -possibly through no fault of her own – and it’s hard to warm to her. She feels like a token ‘final girl’ and the film might have been more intense all round without her interfering in the twisted relationship between the two men.

But all told, this is a much better film than you would expect early on. It doesn’t stop for air and there are enough genuine twists and ambiguities to keep you guessing through to the end. There’s a pumping score that keeps things going and directors Gabriel Carrer and Reese Eveneshen ensure that the film’s savage intensity doesn’t descend into incoherence. This is impressively nasty stuff and well worth sticking with.

For the Sake of Vicious premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival on 2nd September 2020.