No Surrender Cinema: Avenged
A young woman’s road trip goes wrong when she falls prey to a group of vile bastards that take great joy in the harm they bring to her. Will she find a fight to fight back and overcome her assailants, or is help coming from an unlikely place? If you answered yes to both of those questions then you’re the lucky winner, and the grand prize is a new edition of No Surrender Cinema! Keep on reading to find out how these scumbags are made to suffer so that the young woman can be Avenged!
Zoe (Amanda Adrienne) is a young, deaf woman preparing to set course on a trip to move in with her boyfriend Dane (Marc Anthony Samuel). Despite her mother’s concern and hesitation, Zoe eagerly hops into the GTO she inherited from her late father and hits the open road to join the love of her life. As Zoe drives through the desert, she nearly runs over a young Native American man who is being chased by a pack of racist creeps. Zoe tries her best to get him out of there and to somewhere safe, but she’s not quick enough and finds herself being accosted by the bigots and becoming their captive. These grimy townies, led by Trey (Rodney Rowland) brag about murdering numerous Native Americans, berate Zoe for having an African American fiance, and tie her down with barbed wire so that they can all have their way with her. It’s not until Zoe’s been abused and humiliated by the whole gang that she’s able to escape, but her path to safety is cut short when she’s stabbed by one of the cretins and left for dead.
With Zoe knocking on death’s door, a medicine man comes along and retrieves her body, and does what any normal person would do in a situation like this; he attempts to resurrect her. Who needs law enforcement when a good ol’ incantation can do the trick? Zoe returns to the land of the living, but she’s not quite the same, which is evident to the viewer when she begins to levitate and speak in tongues. It turns out that there’s a stowaway spirit possessing her, one that just so happens to be an ancestor of those slaughtered by Trey’s gang. Fueled by their mutual desire for revenge, the spirit uses Zoe’s body as a vessel to rain hell down upon the gang and anyone else that may stand in her/their way. The only catch is that although Zoe is back to walking, talking, and occasionally defying gravity, her body is gradually decomposing.
Avenged is at its best when Zoe is on her killing spree, but the kills range from creative to copycat. One of the scumbags happens to be an officer of the law, but that doesn’t stop Zoe from disemboweling him in the middle of a bar in a scene that reminds one of a similar scene in Machete. Another one of the creeps is used as a human target so Zoe can show off the archery skills she’s gained during her possession. Having his cronies picked off doesn’t sit well with Trey, so he and what’s left of his crew attack Zoe’s fiance (who has come to town looking for her after receiving a call from Zombie Zoe). This only pisses the undead avenger off even more and brings us to the most fun sequence to take place during Avenged‘s short runtime. Zoe shoots an arrow through the through of one of the rednecks (and despite not having the spirit of a war chief inside of him, continues to live far longer than he should have) and engages in battle with the knife wielding West on the back of a moving truck. After stabbing her repeatedly and running her over with said truck (and after having tortured her earlier in the film) only to watch her rise to her feet, Trey and West start to realize that maybe, just maybe, something odd is going on with this girl.
Shit gets real weird in the third act. How weird? When’s the last time you saw a spirit leap out of its host body to have a face to face encounter and forge said person some mystic weaponry from the tribal land? I’ve seen an awful lot of movies and that one was a first for me. Oh, and did I mention that during this same encounter, our heroine was prolonging her lifespan by duct taping herself back together? Something like that plays better in a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously (like Troma’s Decampitated, which became a cult favorite in some circles for its interesting use of duct tape), but in a rape/revenge flick that has played as a straight thriller since it began, it seems out of place. The spirit of the chief could literally craft Zoe weapons out of dirt, but couldn’t give a little boost to her healing factor? Nevertheless, Zoe seeks to finish what she started and sets out for one final showdown to save her fiance and kill the remaining rednecks that took her life away.
Avenged is a strange amalgamation of ideas, but none of them ever feel completely fleshed out. The early part of the movie makes you think we’re about to get an exploitation film in the vein of I Spit On Your Grave, only to imply the harm done to Zoe rather than hover in on it. Once we get past that scene, Avenged can’t decide if it wants to be a horror movie with some action thrown in, or an action movie with horror elements. It also can’t keep its characters straight (outside of Trey and his boys, since they’re as one dimensional as it gets, but that’s par for the course when you’re the villain in a film like this); Zoe goes from being an optimistic young lady, to determined survivor, to supernatural killer, only its not until she returns to the land of the living with the spirit inside her that she makes a call to her boyfriend. Speaking of the boyfriend, he doesn’t serve much purpose other than for the damsel in distress role reveral for the final act. He’s coming unglued at the thought of losing Zoe, but then when she makes her appearance as the Undead Warrior Queen that puts the bad guy hideout under seige, he’s cheerleading her every move with cliches like “My baby has an axe to grind!” Shouldn’t he have been concerned, or maybe even fearful of seeing his beloved killing people quite easily without any formal training?
I intended to check out Avenged for a while once it showed up in my Tubi recommendations, and though I can’t say it was disappointing, I also can’t go out of my way to recommend it. It’s never boring, but therein lies the problem; it tries to be too many things at once, and the identity crisis it has is the biggest detriment of them all. If you’re a fan of DTV movies then this movie plays like a mixtape of everything you love about them, only it’s playing the B sides instead of the hits. It’s good as an oddity or a curiosity watch, but there’s better action and horror out there that deserve 90 minutes of your time more than this one does.
