Set in the aftermath of an economic crisis, Scavenger is set in a desert-like apocalyptic world. Visually, it reminds us of the Mad Max films, but the story is very much the tried and tested rape-revenge plot. We join Tisha, a battle-hardened woman, who makes a living delivering meat to the local butchers. It isn’t your normal meat however, Tisha specialises in performing assassinations, killing people and then passing the meat along so it can be filtered into the food chain. Hired by an elderly woman on the brink of death, Tisha is sent back to the woman’s old place of work, a whore-house, to exact bloody revenge on her ex-employers. Once there, Tisha finds herself incapacitated and chained up alongside the other workers. Whilst there, she meets a man from her past, one that is responsible for years of trauma, and Tisha sees an opportunity to enact her own brand of vengeance too. If she can escape that is.
At just seventy-three minutes long, Scavenger is thankfully only a short watch. I say that because what happens within those minutes are some of the nastiest that I’ve ever seen. Although only short, the film manages to inflict not one, not two, but several sexual assaults on our heroine. She’s brutalised repeatedly, urinated on, and tormented, mostly whilst drugged and unable to even consider defending herself. These scenes all feel excruciatingly long, and when added together, take up at least a third of the total run time. That’s a long time to spend watching uncomfortable images like this, and by the time it’s over, there isn’t much time left for Tisha to punish her tormentors.
The only compelling thing about a rape-revenge story is the payoff of seeing the offenders get their comeuppance, but here we’re cheated out of this, the focus being much more on the act than the aftermath. It’s a massive shame, as when done correctly, these types of stories can open up a dialogue, and the themes and issues explored in many of them can make an impact on audiences. Scavenger just feels dirty. It’s a tricky line to walk and personally I feel on several occasions it veers too close to the wrong side of it. The fact that Tisha is clearly already a victim of deep-seated childhood trauma muddies the water further. Were she to have spent her adult life hunting those that wronged her as a child, minus all the attacks, then Scavenger would definitely be more palatable.
With so much time set aside for these continual attacks, there is insufficient room for plot or character development. The film opens with camcorder footage from a family birthday that gets a violent interruption, and we soon realise that this is Tisha’s past. Throughout the film she flashes back to this day, outside of that there’s not much else we know about her other than she’s good at killing people. Similarly, there’s not much explanation given to how the world has ended up as it has. There are some mentions of economic hardship during the flashback, but that’s about it. The timeline for the film is also only twenty years after that memory, and for things to have dissolved so badly so fast, the audience really needs an explanation. Furthermore, given the state of world economics at the moment, it seems rather far-fetched to think that in two decades we’ll all be sitting down to tuck into Bob from across the road, for dinner.
Scavenger looks as grimly filthy as the plot feels. There’s grime everywhere; our cast are all covered in muck, their clothes disheveled and in need of a wash, and everything appears broken and rundown.
Scavenger attempts to be Mad Max meets I Spit on Your Grave. Filling a massive chunk of screen-time with so much brutality leads the viewer to switch off either literally or mentally, and the promised revenge is too little too late to justify the extent of the ordeals witnessed.
Scavenger was reviewed at Arrow Video Frightfest Halloween.
Scavenger
Summary
Seventy-three minutes of brutality, Scavenger is an ill thought out entry into the overloaded rape-revenge repository.
