ANOTHER DAY OF THE WOMAN?: A Review of HORA (THE WHORE)

 

Remakes, the very uttering of the word gives me visions of a 6 month old cat turd rolled in glass and resealed in a Snickers candy bar wrapper.  I can honestly say I skip most of them. This can be said even more so of the rape revenge sub-genre. Firstly, films of this nature don’t need to be sleek and clean, and they don’t need the latest 20-omething starlet or the fashion world’s most effeminately handsome model as the rapist.

More importantly these films can’t afford the political fascist castration process that anything Hollywood touches must endure. ..However when I discovered that a supposed remake of I Spit On Your Grave from Norway was floating around…that was a different story. If films like The Thrill OF A Kill, Christmas Cruelty,  and Killing Heat have taught me anything it’s that what Norway may lack in a track record of film it more then makes up for with huge blood soaked orgasmicaly politically incorrect balls. Best of all Norway doesn’t hide that fact. FUCK NO it doesn’t just let it’s balls hang, it TEABAGS the censors so hard their eyes smash through their brain and squish on the other side of their collective skull!

It was with this in mind that I sat down to Reinert Kiil‘s hora

hora Introduces a young writer named Rikke who is sick of populated life and starving for inspiration for her new book. She decides a retreat to her dead mother’s secluded cabin in the woods might be just the trick and so heads off to the remote town of Dokka. Soon after arriving a group of local miscreants set their gazes on her. What starts off as mere taunting escalates to a brutal gang rape and disfiguring..but these monsters in men’s clothing have unknowingly unleashed Rikke’s most dark and brutal side an once this demon of justice is channeled there’s no turning back!

Holy fuckin’ shit! It takes a lot to get under my skin. After all this genre in general is one that’s populated with some really really brutal shit, but what we see here makes the rape scene in the original I Spit On Your Grave look like the love scene in Ghost!

Actually, before we go any further with this article I need to point out a HUGE misconception about this movie. While a large portion of this film is a love letter to the I Spit On Your Grave, this is faaar from a remake.  There’s elements and references to everything from A Cruel Picture to Last House On a Dead End Street and even a bit of Walking Tall in here.  Virtually every other review I’ve seen marks this aspect of the film against it. Some reviewers have even gone as far as to call it a rip off…well let’s not mix words. Those reviewers wouldn’t know a cannon from their mothers’ cunts…In other words they don’t know film. Quite a bit of talent is needed to string something like this together and make it comprehensible. Here our director managed to do that and also make a film that has a gut wrenching beauty of it’s own.

The Acting here was very well done all the way around, with Rikke sticking out as the most well played character. Watching her go from the confident sexy independent woman to the fierce merciless angel of death she becomes is nothing short of great.  The only complaint I could put forth if I wanted to be a dick head and nitpick is that I wish there was at least a few positive male characters somewhere in the film to contrast with. Here every guy was a dick..But then again that could be the point considering the era and genre this film is homaging. Exploitation tended to be exaggerated and it tended to be very black and white so if that’s what Kiil was going for then he aced that as well.

The gore here was another point of triumph for this film as it manages to both be effective and retain that cheap off kilter look appropriate for the genre. This was also a point where this film goes one hell of a long mile further then I Spit On Your Grave ever went. I won’t say much..just bring a barf bag.

The cinematography here appeared to be several mid level digital cameras with some gorgeously framed outdoor shots that reminded me quite a bit in their smoothness and eye for detail to William Grefe’s work. We get both golden hued color and slightly chunky black and white, both of which work and give the film an odd feeling of switching back and forth between life and death..however the fake film stock effects came across as gimmicky and almost took me out of the film a few times. This is a small complaint and as a whole didn’t deter me from enjoying the film but I honestly think it would have been better without them.

Overall I give hora no middle fingers up. It’s mean, it’s bloody, it’s offensive and those who dislike it will likely be those who picked it up just to bitch to begin with.