Director Bill Zebub’s exploitation horror film “Breaking her Will” is an exercise in torture. On the audience. It’s tedious, boring, repetitive, redundant, and has no purpose other than to be as shocking as humanly possible with torture methods that are tame compared to what I’ve seen in films like “Hostel” and “Hard Candy.” Bill Zebub doesn’t even want to try to present a premise, he just wants to get to the torture. The movie opens with a young girl hitchhiking. Where is she headed? Why is she hitchhiking? Who knows? She has no bags and barely any clothing. She’s picked up a man on the road who drives through the woods (the girl doesn’t even seem disturbed by this) and he stops at a parking lot and gets out (as she sits in the car confused!), he pulls out a knife on her and in spite of the fact the door is wide open, she submits to being taken hostage instead of doing what normal people would do like fight, or run, or scream. And that’s only the first four minutes.
Don’t get me wrong I love exploitation films, I adore them. They can be interesting and entertaining with the right premise and purpose, but “Breaking Her Will” watches like a porno movie without any of the actual sex or fantasy to it. The performances from both stars are god awful, including our resident psycho, a man who is just utterly hilarious as this psychopath who locks this girl in his trunk, brings her down to the basement without her seemingly fighting, he pins her down on to a wooden board then begs her to try to escape and just when she’s pinned down and has been tricked, the moron starts screaming for help. Dear god I just couldn’t figure out of this was intended to be tongue in cheek or if Bill Zebub was actually assuming this was cinema verite with the potential to be viewed as an art film of a sorts. There’s nothing here that remotely fills me in on the tone. Is this one big joke? Or is this an actual mock snuff film?
Is this guy just a moron? Or are we supposed to take him seriously? And how can we sympathize with a young girl so damn moronic and brain dead? Meanwhile as the film progresses Bill Zebub adds a story or something resembling it by injecting a conspiracy with this girl’s life involving a sex slave organization or whatever in god’s name the psycho was explaining and he even mentions that a person she thought was her friend was really just evaluating her to be a sex slave and set up her capture… which would have been interesting if we saw it in the beginning! Nevertheless the convoluted plot mid-way and the horrific preamble is just impossible to sit through at times. I have a real appreciation for daring filmmaking. When I see it. This isn’t daring, it’s just juvenile misogynistic swill. Hey Bill Zebub seems to have himself something of a cult following and more power to him but as far as low budget exploitation goes, this fails on every conceivable level. There is nothing of actual substance or importance to this other than wanting to see a girl tortured and humiliated for ninety minutes without an actual goal in mind but to shock for the sake of shocking audiences.