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A lacerating expression of horror, sunlit and shadowless to rouse its anxieties out of hiding. The title, infamous by itself, appears in red over Camille Keaton, driving from New York City to the country and finding beastly ignorance, mainly from critics who mistake Meir Zarchi's gorge-riser for repulsive trash, or worse. Keaton strips for a dip into the lake and the camera zooms back into long-shot, but the lenses are already attached, rigorously unable to move away as the mayhem precipitates upon her, therefore upon us. Zarchi arranges the bikinied heroine in the foreground in a hammock as a boat enters the frame, unbalancing the pastoral composition: local yokels showing off, high on sights and thoughts of the city gal's bod. Real-time takes are the gambit, already explored in the fishing 'n' bullshit session with the fellas (Eron Tabor, Anthony Nichols, Gunther Kleeman, and Richard Pace), and given its fullest expression in the outrageously prolonged rape sequence, agony and humiliation threefold, purposefully unwatchable as Keaton suffers the ultimate invasion and a homegrown Eden around her weeps impotently. Exploitation? Every second of her bent over a rock is a second for you, though reviewers made a point of misreading Nichols' deformed close-up shot from the battered P.O.V. of the woman, her degradation about to be capped via a rammed beer bottle. Pace, the designated Village Idiot, fails to finish her off, so Keaton crawls to the shower, hunched as the water washes blood and mud away from her body, but not from her mind -- "Forgive me" in church, and infernal flames lick from the fireplace, for revenge is now her consuming task. Zarchi's tease-despoiling-retribution is the barest of arcs, the better to record the shocks, sexuality vengefully charged and deformed, Keaton a beatific succubus in white luring one attacker straight to the noose, going Lorena Bobbitt on another ("so sweet it's painful"), and finishing the quartet by the pitiless lake. Zarchi is not after excitement, or even empowerment, just purgative nastiness, and Keaton by the boat is Garbo's Queen Christina, hollowed, purified, degraded, alone with only the roar of the motor and the sounds of Roger Ebert walking off "unclean, ashamed and depressed," illuminating the point by missing it by a mile.
--- Fernando F. Croce |