Director: Johnna Hodge, Sam Hodge
Year: 2023
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: The Hag Witch
Genre: Exploitation
Plot:
After being tortured and humiliated by a psychopath, a woman who escaped the situation with a series of triggers for extreme violence sets out on a path of vengeance against anyone and everyone she comes across that set off her triggers eventually leaving a massive trail of bloodshed and bodies behind her.
Review:
This was a pretty fun exploitation-style genre effort. One of the finer aspects of the film is the strong and generally enjoyable setup that provides the necessary reasoning for the ensuing rampage. The situation she finds herself in, trapped and held hostage with her husband and friend and systematically abused by the guy, works quite well at establishing not just the brutal tone the rest of the film follows but the justification for what goes on by signaling the type of psychological and physical abuse she suffers. Watching a person murder both her husband and a random stranger in front of them and then revel in the aftermath with their exclaiming joy at the condition they’ve been left in and feeding their remains to her is rightfully shown to be a traumatizing experience and the psychological impact that type of situation has on person gets explored nicely here with her vicious and brutal outbursts later on being fully justified.
This justification allows the film to go about delivering a solid series of extremely brutal and graphic outbursts to play off the emotional trauma she’s experienced. The series of fantasies and hallucinations she has that showcase the brutal extremes she goes to with the mindset she’s developed that sees nothing wrong with delivering retribution on people including stabbing them in the head repeatedly, slicing their nutsack off to feed it to the perpetrator, or strangling someone with their exposed intestines. These scenarios, which escalate nicely in terms of brutality and graphic execution throughout here, focus more on the catharsis of the situation than shock or thrills but still deliver the goods throughout here especially when it moves beyond her being justified in the actions to the later half spree which is shown to be influenced and outside of her control. That far more overt sense of glee and overwhelming joy at what she’s doing delivers on actively setting out for victims or wallowing in the carnage inflicted on her mission, all of which provides the film with quite a lot to enjoy about it.
There aren’t too many flaws with this one but it does have a few minor factors. A lot of these issues are centered around the bizarre form of punishment doled out here where a lot of the actions that trigger her are shown to be worthy of doling out the kind of reaction here. While it’s mostly explained away by the way her mind’s snapped, the mentality of everything here being met with the kind of murderous instinct for the everyday garden-variety creeps who hit on her and have no follow-up or interaction from the authorities is so unrealistic it doesn’t come off all that well. That no one has suspected or caught on to what she’s doing since there are way too many warning signs about it is unrealistic as well, and this whole factor of the film is somewhat disappointing. That also leaves a lot of these encounters to be highly repetitive with a misconstrued come-on resulting in excessively violent outbursts to seek revenge for what happened that gets old somewhat fast, and overall serve to be the main issues here.
Overview: ****/5
An enjoyable and very worthwhile genre effort, the few places where this one stumbles aren’t enough to detract from the remaining positives that are far more impactful and deliver quite nicely throughout here. Give it a shot if you’re a fan of this style or approach to genre fare while those turned off by the style or approach here should heed caution with this one.
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