There is a scene near the end of this movie that features a straight razor and a prone young girl lying on a couch, and it's mesmerizing and disturbing. The girl's screams as she's being slashed by a maniac sound genuine, an her wounds look too real for comfort. It's a great scene. Too bad that great scene is attached to this movie, which is otherwise a total piece of shit and a waste of your time. Well, that's not completely true, but let me start at the beginning. The movie opens with a dark murky scene of a young woman being raped and strangled in her car. This is actually a good scene too, and I should probably list it up there, but this scene pisses me off because it sets you up to think you're going to watch an amazing and disturbing masterpiece or something and then the next forty five minutes of film feature annoying actors walking around speaking dialogue far too robotic for my tastes and I begin to sharpen a stake so I an drive it through my head because I'm sure I'm watching another famously over hyped grindhouse flick that doesn't live up to its reputation.

At the actual party, we're introduced to more annoying people whom we also want dead the minute we see them, and then something begins to happen that really grates on my nerves. The aforementioned rapist starts following one of the women around, and it looks like she's performing for him, she takes off her clothes, showers seductively, all the while she knows he's watching, and when he "rapes" her she doesn't resist at all, though she yells insults at him, and this pisses me off. Would it kill them to make this rape scene actually look like rape? Do they have to make it look like the girl wants this to happen? Not only that, but this trend continues, because the rapist and this woman have ANOTHER sex scene... I mean rape scene... later on in the film. As the movie drags on, we're left wondering why no one tries to escape since there are only two madmen and a huge house full of exits, and especially when the main rapist is "raping" the girl in another room, it would be easy for someone to distract his less intelligent comrade and make a run for it, but no one does. Not to mention that at this time in the movie we begin to hear insightful dialogue such as "Little miss muffet sat on a truffet eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider who sat down beside her and scared the living shit out of her!" No, I am not making that up. It is quoted verbatim from the lips of the main rapist. Who wrote this dialogue? Someone got paid to write this? What's next, Dr. Seuss?

It all becomes very tedious, and when one woman DOES make a run for it and the mentally challenged man runs after her we're hard pressed to care anymore, but then something amazing happens. She stops running, turns around, and has sex with him! Under a porch! What in the name of God is going on here? We think we're seeing a movie that at the very least is willing to portray rape as graphic and wrong and then we see this bullshit and I would have turned it off but for my desire to sit through to the end so I could say I actually watched the movie. And then something very strange happens. The aforementioned good scene with the young girl and the straight razor happens, and then there's a BIG PLOT TWIST that almost explains everything (though it pretty much paints the partygoers as a bunch of reprobates willing to let their friend on the couch get ravaged, since it sure as hell doesn't look like she knew what was going on) and then the movie's over and I'm left not knowing what to think.

I've watched this movie several times and I still don't know what to think. I can't say that there aren't any scenes worth watching, but I can't recommend it because there's far too much boring and insulting filler in between the good scenes, and I really don't even know what to think about this. I'd say the filmmaker was inept, but I love Deodato's OTHER famous grindhouse classic "Cannibal Holocaust," and I DO see brutality and promise in this film. It looks like he really thought we were going to care about the partygoers and sympathize with their plight and not wonder why one of them doesn't try to take one of the ample opportunities to escape. Maybe he also thought the rape scenes looked graphic, or that we'd believe the girl who tried to run away and then had sex with her pursuer actually liked the guy, or sympathized with him because he was retarded, or maybe he thought the twist would explain everything instead of leaving us confused and even angrier at the selfish assholes collected at the party. Who knows. I suppose I recommend checking this movie out but don't say I didn't warn you if you have to fast forward through the bulk of this flick in order to see anything worthwhile.