Whether you call it Thriller: A Cruel Picture, Hooker’s Revenge or They Call Her One-Eye, there’s no doubt that this Swedish grindhouse/arthouse mélange of awful/awesomeness is the most hardcore rape/revenge picture ever made — both figuratively and literally. Written and directed by Bo Arne Vibenius, the film stars European softcore icon Christina Lindberg as Frigga (in the original Swedish version; Madeleine in the dubbed version), a young country girl whose personal trials would have the Bible’s Job shaking his head with teary-eyed sympathy.
Rendered permanently mute following a childhood rape, the now adult Frigga is on her way to visit her doctor in the city when she’s picked up by a suave, sophisticated gentleman who promptly drugs her unconscious and proceeds to inject pure heroin into her veins. After spending weeks in a druggy haze, she’s informed that her body is now so dependent on horse, she’ll die without a daily dose, which she’ll — naturally — have to fuck strangers for money to receive. To make her terrible situation even worse, her pimp forges a letter to her devoted parents claiming she never wants to see them again, which they promptly respond to by committing suicide!
Frigga quickly learns the consequences of rebellion when her pimp punishes her by plunging a scalpel into her right eye (earning her both the nickname described in one the film’s alternate titles and a reason to sport a series of stylish patches). Instead of breaking her spirit, however, this only inspires her to secretly charge her “clients” extra to do the really dirty shit (which, by today’s Internet porn standards, admittedly doesn’t seem so bad) and use the cash to buy her own drugs, and train with experts in the fine arts of ass-kicking until she’s ready to proclaim her independence and properly exhibit her (extremely justified) dissatisfaction.
Clinical and unrelentingly brutal (Vibenius used an actual cadaver for the eyeball sequence and inserted grimy, XXX-penetration shots featuring a distinctly “brown-eyed” Lindberg body double to graphically highlight Frigga’s degradation), They Call Her One-Eye is less successful as an action movie than as a soberly Scandinavian depiction of man’s inhumanity to (wo)man. Spared the potential indignity of dialogue, Lindberg’s performance is more appropriately enigmatic than unfortunately wooden and the film benefits greatly from her impressive physical presence (which is covered throughout by costumes Tarantino lifted directly for Darryl Hannah in Kill Bill).
Not for the squeamish, politically correct or anyone frightened by foreign sensibilities, They Call Her One-Eye remains an utterly unique cinematic achievement no matter what its title. —Allan Mott