Fifteen years after being raped as a child (and mute ever since), farm girl Frigga (Swedish sexploitation star Christina Lindberg, Maid in Sweden) rather naïvely accepts a ride from a stranger (Heinz Hopf, Exposed). Instead of delivering her to her doctor’s appointment, Tony takes her out for a steak dinner, then back to his rape pad, where he proceeds to drug her drink and get her hooked on high-grade smack.

Tony’s intent is to get her so addicted that she’ll be forced to work for him as a prostitute. Frigga takes this news so not well that when her first would-be client arrives, she claws the guy’s face. Ever the businessman, Tony’s response is to cut out her left eye with a scalpel. (On the bright side, this allows Frigga to don a variety of colorful eye patches for the bulk of the film, not to mention sparks her to learn martial arts.)

Whoever decreed this rape-revenge with the name of Thriller: A Cruel Picture, truer words never were spoken. The point of viewers being subjected to witness Frigga’s debasement is to make her eventual doling out of comeuppance to her abusers that much more cathartic, even near-patriotic. Writer/director Bo Arne Vibenius, a protégé of Ingmar Bergman, wants us to revel in her acts of vengeance that he slows down the shots so we see every explosion of the squibs, every kick to the balls, every trail of blood bursting forth like the tail end of a cracked whip.

Shrewdly, Vibenius denies us the money shot of top tormentor Tony, but we are not spared the drawn-out demises of any johns, including the guy who dared sport tight, bright-red briefs with a tiger pattern. (Speaking of “money shot,” an alternate version includes hardcore inserts, entirely unnecessary.) Artier than you’d expect, this Cruel Picture plays the rape-revenge game more aggressively than Abel Ferrara’s silent victim of Ms. 45 would eight years later. —Rod Lott

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