Savaged

A deaf mute, beautiful and independent, heads to California to be with her beloved, but her plans were curtailed by a depraved group, known for killing Apache due to a generational hatred between ancestors on both sides, who not only sexually abuse her but plan to kill her. But what this group doesn't expect is for her to be inhabited by a vengeful spirit with an ax to grind!

**½ / *****

To kind of put Savaged in a nutshell: raised from the dead by a lonely Native American living in a trailer in New Mexico after being stabbed in the back by a brooding, sullen, grizzled, laconic killer using a Rambo-sized Bowie knife and left in a desert barely-buried grave, Zoe (Amanda Adrienne), a sweet, lovely deaf mute with limited talking capabilities, would not have survived a resurrection ritual if a great Apache warrior’s vengeful spirit not returned from the dead to find her body a host to do his bidding.

So you have Zoe and the Apache warrior both inside her body, while it slowly decomposes, only provides her with a limited time to exact revenge. The ringleader of the garden variety vile, repulsive, desert racist hick group is played by Rodney Rowland without a hint of conscience or guilt as he and his pack of repellent wild animals rape, abuse, and traumatize Zoe. Yep, Zoe is barb-wire bound to a bed, with the cretins taking turns having their way with her battered, bloody, and ravaged body. Then, after freeing herself from the barbwire in a squirm-inducing moment, Zoe doesn’t have the strength to get away from that Bowie knife jammed deep in her back.


Seeing Zoe pull away bandages to reveal a hole in her arm and maggots crawling inside, her body levitating off the ground as the Apache spirit commandeers her mortal “shell”, the actual ghost spirit of the Apache leave Zoe’s body for a moment to expose two hidden weapons (hatchet and shaped dagger) for her to use against her (and his ancestral white) enemies, and getting stabbed multiple times, hurled from a truck bed to be run over (and backed over) yet pull herself up for a primal scream, lose an eye, eat a beating heart plucked from a chest, take a full spinning blade of a chainsaw in the torso, playing tug of war with a victim using his intestines after disemboweling him with a broken beer battle, duct-taping her arms so that the broken bones will not cause her to lose her limbs while in combat, and using a bow and arrow like an expert marksman should all tell you what kind of crazy rape-revenge supernatural nonsense Savaged really is.

This film doesn’t elaborate the rape or explicitly show Zoe on the constant receiving end of mob sexual abuse. Sometimes the film shies away from explicit violence as well. A butchering might happen just out of the camera’s view, a beheading doesn’t quite occur in full view, and stabs are more or less heard as tight editing and quick cuts limit what is truly shown on screen. Still there’s still plenty of violence. Arrows pierce plenty of body parts, a pool stick is broken and stabbed into an eye, nasty disembowelments claim a few victims, and Zoe’s degree of bodily deterioration and physical toll taking on Rowland’s rowdies certainly leaves her totally unrecognizable by film’s end. Although influences show in Savaged, the desert desolation, hard-hitting style during the action scenes, and Zoe (eyes black and absent color when the spirit takes over as that feral / ferocious rage presents itself, casting a striking presence when the revenge part of this film kicks into high gear) presented as an Angel of Destruction did leave me more than satisfied by the time this is over.

The love of Zoe and her fiancé (played by Marc Anthony Samuel) is reinforced time and again as he tries to find her and she knows where he is but cannot allow him to see her in such a damaged state. Rowland plays his part as a sleazy, unapologetic, profane, crude, cruel bastard to the degree that we want to see him suffer in anguish and get what’s coming to him.