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The tagline “Even Bad Girls Need Protection” should turn many a Grindhouse connoisseur’s head toward its direction. Couple that with the exploitative stylized cover art and a wonderfully slinky appearance from Scream Queen Danielle Harris, Michael Beihn’s The Victim promises sleazy B-movie fun and madness. Unfortunately, it doesn’t completely deliver what it’s fully capable of and only turns on its smarts in the final scene with a sudden twist.
Written by Beihn in just about two weeks, The Victim opens with its greatest exploitation scene. The lovely Danielle Harris, playing a stripper named Mary, gets her groove on doggy-style up against a rock in the woods. Let that soak in a minute, fellas, before moving on. While no flesh is on display, the opening scene is a sexy shocker - what the rest of the movie should have been – and is gone all too soon.
Danielle Harris, ass in the air, enjoying herself a bit and then, when passion turns to poison, she is unexpectedly killed by the man thrusting behind her.
Leave it to her friend, Annie (Jennifer Blanc), to seek refuge in a lonesome ex-con named Kyle (Biehn) as she, after convincing him to help her, plans revenge against the crooked cop (Ryan Honey) who killed Mary and his perverted buddy Cooger (Denny Kirkwood) who helped him hide the body. As her attackers approach the woods where the two have set up camp, a battle of wits ensues as they try to be the first to find Mary’s body, buckets of blood is dumped and clothing is shed, and an irreparable twisted truth is exposed.
With memorable acting turns in James Cameron’s Aliens, The Terminator and The Abyss, Biehn was suddenly shutdown by the unforgiving 1990’s and starred in some pretty forgettable films. With Biehn moving behind the camera as writer, director and star, The Victim benefits from the dedication he usually brings to any project. Here, his is the best and most solidly interesting performance with his wife’s (Blanc) and her ample bosom being a close second.
Unfortunately, their acting and producing partnership doesn’t lift the film from being anything but a below par thriller. The Victim is NOT grindhouse. It has its moments, but the film takes itself far too seriously to be anything but an aimlessly meandering thriller for large parts of its running time. What’s missing is everything a film like Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror was. There’s little sense of fun and, with a plot that strays too far from what it is, the crass thrills are too late and far too spread out.
While the borderline pornographic moments between Beihn and Blanc build nicely, the scantily clad Harris is the film’s only titillating factor and, as her character is killed all too soon, leaves audiences hungry for real grindhouse shenanigans. Not just relegated moments of spark and fizzle in conversating flashbacks. The film needs more blood, more kills, and much more sex. It needs SOMETHING to happen that is uniquely grindhouse as this is what it advertises itself to be.
The Victim isn’t an awful film but it is a dull one. There’s nothing to laugh at; no humor, unintentional or not, so there’s nothing that really makes it memorable. Fans of grindhouse core will be disappointed and fans of quiet thrillers might have an ending that will make their mouths water. Either way, The Victim will disappoint because so little actually happens.
MPAA Rating: 
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