Also known under the far less exploitative title of Act of Vengeance, the AIP release Rape Squad is one of those strange drive-in thrillers that packs a feminist message of female empowerment, but only after giving audiences gratuitous images of the women being groped and molested.

Lunch wagon proprietor Linda (Jo Ann Harris, The Beguiled) is the film’s first and foremost victim, raped by a man dressed right out of a slasher series, what with his hockey mask and orange jumpsuit. During the assault, he creepily “requests” that she sing “Jingle Bells” because — his words here, so don’t shoot the messenger — “Music is always good with ballin’!”

When she finds other women who underwent similar trauma, she excitedly poses the hence-the-title question, “How do you feel about forming a rape squad?” Even without Linda explaining what a rape squad is or does, and what privileges its membership possibly could have, the ladies are all-in. It entails taking karate classes, followed by a nude group Jacuzzi bath, then turning the tables on predatory dudes via such methods of dying their dicks blue. Activism never felt so … I dunno, primary-hued?

Bob Kelljan of AIP’s Count Yorga pictures directs from a script credited in part to Betty Conklin. Don’t be fooled thinking a woman had any creative say on this uncomfortable revenger, as that’s a nom de plume for David Kidd, scribe of The Swinging Cheerleaders, which I’m guessing isn’t to be found on Gloria Steinem’s shelves. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Thirty-five years before Uma Thurman’s Kill Bill bride murdered her way through a five-person list to avenge the assassination of her would-be hubby, Jeanne Moreau did the same in The Bride Wore Black. The film was director François Truffaut’s homage to the suspense thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock, whom the French New Wave pioneer interviewed in the now-essential cinema-study text Hitchcock/Truffaut, published one year before.

For this stylish tribute, Truffaut brought frequent Hitch composer Bernard Herrmann (Psycho) along for the tour and tapped a crime novel by Cornell Woolrich, who wrote the short story on which Hitch’s Rear Window was based.

While the details surrounding the shooting are held from viewers too long that confusion initially reigns, brand-new wife Julie Kohler (Moreau, La Femme Nikita) watches in horror as the love of her life is shot dead on the church steps, presumably seconds after the ceremony bound them ’til death do they part.

Part!

One thwarted suicide attempt later, the grieving, perpetually frowning Julie decides to move on with life, as in getting even with the quintet of card-playing bachelors responsible for her spouse’s untimely demise. As she does so, each through a wildly different method — pushing, poisoning, whatev — she crosses off the poor bastard’s name in her little black book. (An avenger’s trade secret? Accurate, real-time record-keeping.)

Even masters of cinema have their missteps, and that’s how Bride may strike viewers who look at it strictly as an exercise in the Hitchcock vein. Without Herrmann’s score in place, the movie doesn’t feel the slightest Hitchcockian; heck, Moreau isn’t even blonde! To be fair, approach Truffaut as Truffaut. The French approach genre markedly different than the English, and Bride is his take on the thriller as Fahrenheit 451 was his take on sci-fi: an ambitious, if not entirely successful marriage of art and commerce. With an unexpected sequence of animation, the film is always interesting to look at, even when the story points lag. Don’t pay too much attention beyond what resides at the surface, because Truffaut didn’t; in fact, he left open a huge plot hole — upon which the entire work hinges. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.