... THEY CALL HER ONE EYE.

Ok - it's real. I'm convinced.

I'm watching THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE right now and have just gotten to the infamous 'de-eyeing' shot. There'd have to be some VERY strong evidence to the contrary to convince me that I have NOT in fact just witnessed an extreme close-up of a scalpel puncturing the eye of a corpse.

How do I feel about this? Not too diggity, but I'm not likely to take up arms, either. For good or ill, I tend to be pretty accepting of what's put (what I put) in front of me, and can compartmentalize like a mofo.

Hmmm.

Back to the flick...

I read somewhere that they used a corpse but don't know how realiable that statement is. For Un Chien Andalou they used a sheep's eye.

What did you think of THRILLER? After reading so much high praise for this film on the Mobius boards and elsewhere, I really thought I was going to see something exciting and riveting.

I didn't.

The fuss over THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE has me completely baffled. I watched Synapse's DVD a couple of weeks ago, only to be faced with one of the dullest, most pointless downers I have ever been confronted with. After an hour of degradation, ugliness and cruelty, fueled in part by absolutely gratuitous hardcore inserts which add nothing to the story or characters, I was at least looking forward to some asskicking violence. What I got instead were ridiculous car explosions, non-chase chase scenes and the most boring slow-motion fight scenes ever put on film. I received no entertainment value from THRILLER, which doesn't work on either a grindhouse or arthouse level. The drama is turgid, the presentation is bleak, the performances unconvincing, and the action worthless.

I have no complaints with Synapse's DVD presentation, extras or cover art (except that I was totally fooled by the hyperbolic marketing :P ), but the film was a complete waste of my time and the celluloid on which it was shot. THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE is one of the worst films I have ever seen.

It may not be fair for me to judge since the only version I've ever seen had no subs and was supplied to me via a third generation dub. However, that viewing experience did not leave me yearning for a DVD release and I have no plans of picking up the Synapse disc, though I'm sure they did their usual fantastic job.

The film was very boring. The slow-mo action scenes at first struck me as interesting, but the longer they went on the more laughable they became.

And while I don't understand the movie's appeal, Ms. Lindberg's appeal is very obvious. What other films has she done of this nature?

I don't think the movie is the best thing Christina Lindberg ever did, but I don't think it's boring. I thought it did a very calculated and successful job of communicating post-traumatic shock; after the initial attack, the movie slows down and feels numbed out, reflecting the heroine's complete loss of human feeling. It may be a dramatic fault that there's no one else in the picture with whom to sympathize, and that the numbness continues throughout the slow-motion executions of her revenge, but to me, this shows that there is nothing truly cathartic or liberating about her revenge. It may not be everyone's idea of good drama, but I think what the film says is true on an emotional level -- that violence is degrading, and that revenge is a futile means of putting paid to violence.

I'm pretty sure the eye-stabbing made use of a corpse; the detail in that eyelash is simply too fine, and I know what special makeup effects were capable of doing in that time period. First of all, a makeup artist would never have been able to replicate those fine eyelashes and, secondly, they would have overstated the violence with a lot of spurting blood. Oddly enough, I think the least successful aspects of the movie are its realistic ones: the eye-stabbing and the hardcore sex inserts. Both seem needlessly exploitative and, more importantly, detract from Lindberg's intent to deliver a performance. She could have sold both scenes more effectively had the director trusted her to project her character's emotions as she's being maimed and raped.

Lindberg is at her best in Joe Sarno's YOUNG PLAYTHINGS, Arne Mattson's MAID IN SWEDEN, and as the teenage girl tortured by incestuous longings for her brother in Ernst Hofbauer's SECRETS OF SWEET SIXTEEN. I haven't seen another film she's supposedly very good in, which was released here as THE DEPRAVED.

The hardcore shots were annoying...I didn't really have anything against the idea of them but I don't think they do the film any favors. I understand the intent, but it was just lamely done. Seeing the bottom half of some dirty early seventies Swedish drug addicts didn't really make me feel any more sympathy for the degradation done to Lindberg's character. Than I already did, anyway.

Overall the film was better than I expected. I'm at a disadvantage to a lot of MHVFers in that I missed all of these films when they first became notorious or cult, being a little kid during the 80s laserdisc and grey market dvd bootleg explosion(let alone not even being alive in the heyday of the 70s grindhouse theaters) and only hearing about many of these films for the first time when they're released on dvd. Given that, I've had a good time catching up, and I think this is one of the gems of the exploitation genre that I've seen.

EDIT: Oh and that eye gouging was totally real, imo. The details of the face around the eye would be fantastic sfx on a dummy TODAY. And Tim's right, the natural inclination would've been to amp up the splooge/squirt factor. It's relative lowkey nature gives it away as real.

I was pleasantly surprised by THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE (as I elaborate in my review). What struck me as the film's most impressive facet was the performance Christina Lindberg gave and the unflinching nature of the depiction of the violence and hardship she endures. The film is also incredibly beautifully shot, with those richly-coloured exteriors being absolutely spellbinding to look at (and making for a great contrast with the monochromatic interiors). The jury is definitely out on the hard-core inserts though, and I definitely think that they were not 100% necessary. They might work for some people, and I didn't find them particularly invasive, but they struck me as a bit pointless... although Vibenius's reasons for including them are open to speculation.

From Jan Lumholdt's interview with Christina Lindberg, published in Videooze #8 (Spring, 1996):

“You know how they did that scene where they’re poking out her eye? … Well, he (Vibenius) knew some doctor, and he asked him to get a hold of a corpse to perform the poking on. So they’re really cutting (with a scalpel) through the eye of a corpse (of a girl my age), on which he had painted the face (with rouge, mascara, and the like). You see, that’s the way he worked … I was told this story long afterwards … I’m glad he didn’t do this to me.”

I'll have to throw my vote in with the "worthless" camp. To me it seemed like the perfunctory revenge segments were just an excuse for the title's cruel parts earlier, much as mondo films say they're educational when that's not even remotely their intention. And though I'm a big fan of extended takes, Thriller seemed to just drag on and on for no real purpose; the slow motion didn't help. Since the director worked with Bergman I would guess this was intentional but it sure felt like he padded a 15-minute short out to two hours.

My wife and I watched THRILLER last week and enjoyed it for the most part. I, too, think that the hard core inserts (besides being pretty gross!) were unnecessary and not needed to display the degradation Lindbergh's character was going through.


There's a slightly longer look at the eye-gouge (oh great... now I have the Fred Blassie song in my head!) in the out takes section. Ulp! Yeah... that sure looks real!

Count me as part of the "worthwhile" camp!

I enjoyed THRILLER for the most part and did not think the hardcore inserts were gratuitous. They were quite ugly, actually, and since most of the sex scenes were defacto "rape" scenes, the ugliness served the context.

As for it being "the movie that has no limits of evil", that's pure nonsense and might be accurate coming from the unsoiled mind of a ten year old. I've seen "evil", on celluloid, believe me, and this is not it.

I was not at all bothered by the film's slow pacing and thought the overall Super-8-like style suited the grim subject matter. The eye piercing earns its stripes and the sexy Lindberg delivers a terrific performance. She really is hot in this flick.

"The roughest revenge movie ever made"? (as per the Tarantino quote). I'd say not because the actual revenge scenes are not very brutal.

Still, the film's general tone is very nihilistic and rough-edged and there is much entertainment to be had.

Even though everyone said Quentin got his inspiration for daryl Hannah's character from this film, wasn't he also a big fan of SWITCHBLADE SISTERS and was systematically involved in the films re-release? Well the main protagonist in SWITCHBLADE SISTERS was a eye patched character named Patches, perhaps his insipration was from that instead? Did he actually mentioned THEY CALL HER ONE EYE as the film that he gotten the daryl Hannah character from?

Well... overinflated expectations will hurt anything from a Steckler to a Welles, and since this release has been obsessed over for a year, it's no wonder anyone not predisposed to enjoy it is disappointed. But I still heart THRILLER. Usually grindhouse enthusiasts reserve highest marks for the most energetic and wacked-out of films. When someone tells you why COFFY or NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES is great, it's usually a laundry list of highlights. THRILLER is so cold and spare compared to its cousins that the hardcore inserts, corpse mangling and slo-mo blood fountains barely seem like the exploitable elements that make up an exploitation film: they seem clinical, as if THRILLER is a misguided European educational film about root causes of violent behavior in women. It plays like a perfect flow chart, methodically piling awful abuse on a person as if it weren't a story but a medical experiment to find the breaking point of the human spirit. I've never seen the film without the hardcore shots, but I can imagine the film would feel pretty identical without them. There's something about the matter-of-factness of the shots that neither makes the scenes more titilating or uglier, just more blunt. The movie is a sawed-off shotgun, and if a few minutes of unsimulated sex are the only thing in THRILLER that you find "gratuitous," you're more jaded than me: I thought the fun of exploitation movies is that the whole thing is gratuitous.

Yes, Walter, Quentin DID say the eye-patched Hannah was inspired by THRILLER. Many, many interviews he's done have said this (here are a few examples):

In Cinescape magazine, in a side-bad where Tarantino lists "the best 7 exploitation movies of all time", he mentions THRILLER and specifically says that it inspired KILL BILL.

Also, here's a direct quote from an interview Quentin did for JAPATTACK.
JAPATTACK Tarantino Interview

TM: The character of Daryl Hannah is based on They Call Her One Eye (AKA Thriller, Bo Arne Vibenius, 1974,Sweden)?

QT: Oh, definitely! I love Christina Lindberg. And that's definitely who Daryl Hannah's character is based on. In the next movie, she's wearing mostly black. Just like They Call Her One Eye, she's got some color co-coordinated eye patches. And that is, of all the revenge movies I've ever seen, that is definitely the roughest. The roughest revenge movie ever made! There's never been anything as tough as that movie.

Interesting, so Quentin must like Girls with eyepatches then! ;) By the way, great disc Don. I was talking to vernon becker, who told me he is the one who brought the film to the U.S for sale! He doesn't remember the director at all, but told me he and Lindberg was walking into studios, hoping they would pick it up, as AIP eventually did.

I suspect that most of us read her name with a hard American "g" in mind, but I understand that Christina Lindberg's name is pronounced "Lindbairy" in Swedish, just as the correct pronunciation of Ingmar Bergman's name (as Cameron Mitchell once told me) is "Bairymann."

Who doesn't!

But then how do you pronounce Ingmar? :D

I watched THRILLER last night and it made a huge impression on me. I wasn't expecting to like it very much at all, knowing its subject matter. It's hard for me to watch rape scenes in general, and, I imagined, much harder in a grindhouse/exploitation context. I've never been a big fan of movies like IRREVERSIBLE, where the point is just to show brutalization against women without making any further point. But I figured I needed to see THRILLER after hearing so much about it.

MAN, was I amazed. This is not at all what I was expecting. Sure, there were some pretty pornographic moments, like those hardcore inserts, but in my opinion the inserts kept the rape scenes from being just some pleasant thing for people to watch. Her sexual degredation wasn't meant to be a crowd-pleaser; it was depicted like the nasty, mechanical process it was. I would usually hate something like that in a movie, but it worked here.

Also, I loved the character of One Eye! I was bouncing in my chair as she learned kung-fu and blasted her oppressors away. She even flies through the air and beats up cops!! [watch the alternate footage for that!] Strong female characters are rare in the types of movies that I like [since most horror/genre films are made with the male audience in mind], so this was really a pleasant surprise. One Eye is my hero! I plan to buy a copy as soon as possible!