Bo Arne Vibenius
“Thriller: A Cruel Picture” rape & revenge directed in 1973 by Alex Fridolonski, pseudonym of the Swedish Bo Arne Vibenius (former assistant director of Bergman for his "Persona"). Having emancipated himself from the illustrious mentor, embittered by his debut as a director with a film that turns out to be a bloodbath, decides to shock his audience, substantially creating a commercial but at the same time lacking prudery, which he will define with his own words <<shit full of sex and violence>>.
A filthy film, dirty and cruel, but also for those who want to see it a Bergman film full of sex and violence. A multi-acclaimed porn-thriller and at times hyper-valued but still to be seen as one of the most famous sexploitation ever made, a genre archetype to which a lot has to "I spit on your grave-M.Zarchi". Sweden, 1970s; Frigga/Madeleine (played by playmate Christina Linderg) a young girl muted after a sexual assault as a child, one day she is approached by a pimp named Tony (Heinz Hopf) from whom she accepts a ride to the city, who wines and dines her to then fascinates her, kidnaps her, makes her dependent on heroin and then forces her into house-call prostitution.
A Frigga 'uncooperative' act sends Tony in to 'teach' her a lesson -captured in a disturbing sequence shown without cuts or visual tricks, created by dissecting a real body- per way of an actual close-up knife-to-eye penetration gouging scene. Forced to humble himself again, she finally decides to get revenge by turning into a ruthless angel of revenge with a sawed-off shotgun, a trench coat and eye-patch. The violence is raw, dry, squeeze in the face and crystallized in ralenty at times exhausting, shot with a video camera at 500 frames per second, of the army. Probably one of the most shocking films in the history of cinema, it is not difficult to see how much influence it has had on current filmmakers from Carpenter, to Lars Von Trier, to Tranatino who was inspired by Frigga to build Elle Driver in his “Kill Bill” that today appears as a primordial version of this. Vibenius and his masterpiece manages to marry violence and poetry in a film that has no content, but only a lot of style.
Thriller: A Cruel Picture
director ALEX FRIDOLINSKI (alias BO ARNE VIBENIUS)
year 1973
director of photography ANDREAS BELLIS
cast CHRISTINA LINDBERG, HEINZ HOPF, DESPINA TOMAZANI, PER-AXEL AROSENIUS, SOLVEIG ANDERSSON
words SILVIA GAIA MARCELLI
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