Savaged doesn't give you very long to get comfortable before throwing you in at the deep end. Zoe is a 20something deaf-mute woman who is travelling through the American southwest in order to move in with her fiance. While going through a small New Mexico town, however, she comes across two Native American men who are being hunted for sport by a gang of racist rednecks (one of whom, their nominal leader, bears a slightly unsettling resemblance to Norman Reedus). When she tries to help the two victims she ends up in the killers' sights, and they kidnap, rape and torture her before stabbing her and leaving her for dead in the desert.
A local Apache shaman finds her clinging to life, however, and attempts to save her life. During the ritual he performs to return her soul to her body however, the soul of long-dead Apache chief Mangas Coloradas, who just so happened to have been betrayed and murdered by the very ancestor of the raping, murdering rednecks we met earlier, comes along as well and he takes over Zoe's body to get revenge on the men who brutalized them both.
Savaged has been described as a combination of I Spit on Your Grave and The Crow and really, that's not too bad a description. It's a rape-revenge movie with a supernatural element, and it pretty effectively succeeds at what it sets out to do. A good part of this is due to actress Amanda Adrienne's portrayal of Zoe; a beautiful, happy young woman whose only crimes were to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and trying to help somebody. Because of this she finds herself in a living hell twice over - first when she is tortured and raped by the rednecks, and then later when her body is used by Mangas Coloradas for revenge but continues to slowly rot as their shared need for vengance becomes the only thing keeping her/them going. She certainly doesn't look like she should be able to inflict the kind of damage she's doing to the redneck gang of murderers, being as delicate and willowy as she is, so it's almost as though she's performing a form of very deadly interpretive dance.
One scene in particular stands out to me - Zoe, possessed by Mangus but at that point in control of her body, finds an old radio in a barn and discovers that she can hear for the first time in her life. She listens happily to some classical piano playing for a few moments, before accidentally changing channel to so a war programme and jumping away from the noise in fear. It might not be the most subtle of metaphors, but it is effective.
On the other hand, the film does suffer from having its villains be... well, too villainous. When we meet them they're running down and murdering Native Americans for sport, and it just goes downhill from there. They're racists (from a long line of racists, no less); they're rapists; they're murderers... they're really more charicatures of villains, missing only some random animal cruelty or one of them stealing a balloon from a small child to complete the picture. Two of them do show some small glimmers of personality beyond "rape, kill, repeat" (one of them doesn't rape Zoe and attempts to give her a quick death when they decide to kill her, while their leader the Norman Reedus-alike almost seems to be regretting some of his actions by the film's end) but they're not actually developed in any way. They're really just made to be as reprehensible as possible so we can properly sit back and enjoy Zoe/Mangus getting their revenge on them.
Cardboard, "evil for evil's sake" antagonists aside though, Savaged is quite a good little indie film. It certainly brings a new twist to the rape-revenge subgenre (although I have to admit I'm not too fond of the subgenre in the first place) and some of its setpieces are pretty good for a low-budget film (a tomahawk vs bowie knife fight in the truck bed of a moving pickup truck, for example). Plus a chance to learn some genuine Apache history.
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