The Horror Show
Bound to Vengeance
by José Manuel Cravioto
If you’re browsing the Netflix horror section one of these days, you might stumble upon a film called Bound to Vengeance. That’s how I found out about it, and unfortunately, like most movies found in the depths of Netflix Instant Streaming, it’s not quite worth your time.
We’re introduced to Eve through video taken by her boyfriend; the bubbly twenty-something and her significant other are enjoying their time in the park and at the fair. These little snippets of video will invade the story randomly throughout the movie, and that’s the first thing I found to be annoying. Yes, the videos ultimately play a bigger part but I could have done with one showing at the beginning and another at the end.
Moving on…
The next time we see Eve, she’s in the basement of some creep’s house in the middle of nowhere. She’s obviously been there for quite some time and she’s managed to pull a large brick from the wall in order to attack her captor and escape. Unfortunately for Eve, there’s nothing around for miles and the phone in the house doesn’t work. She begins searching the home for keys to the van out front only to discover boxes containing pictures of herself and several other girls that are being held captive elsewhere. When Eve demands that her captor give her the keys to the van or she’ll kill him, he reminds her that he’s the only one who knows where those girls are, and if she kills him, she will basically be responsible for their deaths. Eve then sets up a clever device, like a dog catcher would use on a feral beast, to force her captor into the van and then holds him at gun point as he drives around from house to house so Eve can attempt to save the other girls.
The film starts off strong, it really does. Eve (played by Tina Ivlev) assumes the role of strong female lead immediately, making it clear that she’s no longer going to be taking shit from anyone. Sure, she should have probably contacted the cops and let them figure out where all the other girls were, but I can understand revenge outweighing doing the right thing. But eventually things just blow up in Eve’s face; one misfortune after the other makes it appear as if everything is just one big joke and the whole story just becomes silly to me. Without giving anything away, I’ll just say that after finding the first girl and dealing with that whole ridiculous situation, Eve should have definitely done the right thing and contacted the police. Sure, you might say, “but Stevie, then there wouldn’t have been a movie.”
Yes. That’s exactly my point.
I get the angle of the revenge genre, I do. And I actually did appreciate the fact that the director and writers skipped over any unnecessary rape scenes; the story was told just fine without them. But what I don’t get is why the story had to be so frustrating. I think they wanted to try and make it stand out or be something new, I’m just not sure. What could have been a tasteful revenge flick with a great twist ended up being sloppy and obvious.
Our heroine, Eve, ends up looking like a clueless idiot most of the time when she’s supposed to be hell-bent on revenge and helping these other girls. What starts off as a strong female lead overcoming adversity soon unravels and becomes a woman making poor choices that negatively impact not only her life but the lives of others.
On the gore and violence scale, it’s there, but not the way you might want it to be. It is surely not intense or shocking. Rather than using guns for the majority of the film, I think melee weapons would have felt more satisfying, especially in a revenge flick. There is a pretty great scene with a wrench, but let me point out that it’s not Eve doing the damage because she was too busy making another stupid decision that nearly got her killed.
All in all, what could have been a great film just wasn’t, and that’s the short and sweet of it.
Stevie Kopas, HMS
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