Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on June 26, 2015, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
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For a horror movie allegedly devoted to female empowerment, Bound to Vengeance—at least in its first half—is awfully devoted to the ways its women characters can hasten their own deaths.
The heroine of J.M. Cravioto’s feature directorial debut is Eve (Tina Ivlev), though the first person we meet is Phil (Richard Tyson), the incongruously named villain who has been keeping her chained in his basement for an undisclosed amount of time. That period ends when Eve manages to overpower Phil and escape the cellar—but not his remote, isolated house. Attempting to find the keys to start Phil’s van, she comes across evidence that she isn’t his only victim—he’s got other young women stashed elsewhere in the area, and is the only one who knows where they are. And so, despite the title (changed from Reversal, under which the film first played at Sundance), Eve’s mission becomes one not of vengeance but of rescue, as she forces Phil to lead her to each captive so she can set them free.
That title only comes up at the end of this long introductory sequence, a good 20 minutes into this 80-minute feature. Yet even at that abbreviated running time, Bound to Vengeance feels padded, largely by flashbacks/home movies of Eve’s happier times with her boyfriend Ronnie (Kristoffer Kjornes, son of co-scripter Keith Kjornes). The more these bits keep recurring, the more obvious it becomes that they’re there for another purpose besides easy irony, upsetting what is supposed to be one of the big latecoming plot reversals. (Perhaps that’s why they changed the name?)
Anyway, the bigger problem is in the movie’s here and now. As Eve and Phil travel through a long, dark night, Eve’s plans to save the first couple of abductees become violently confounded, in ways that subvert whatever kind of girl-power charge the film might have had. Even when her quest finds a little more success, she continues to make foolish choices that blunt her effectiveness as the heroine. Along the way, writers Rock Shaink and Kjornes make misplaced flirtations with eliciting sympathy for the devil, as Phil tells Eve at one point, “I never meant to hurt anyone” and “You suffered, I’ve suffered too.”
That last line is keyed to the idea that Phil isn’t the only perpetrator behind the crimes, which might have paid dividends if the movie had developed it beyond a banal All Men Are Evil motif. Despite unnecessary stylistic flourishes that work against the overall down-and-grungy veneer Cravioto aims for, the story development is overly simplistic, consisting mostly of Eve and Phil driving from one sleazepit to the next. “How much longer to the next one?” Eve asks at one point, echoing what may become the viewer’s mantra.
Bound to Vengeance’s message ultimately becomes less one of overcoming adversity and more about the futility of struggling against a violent world—a point of view that the film has neither the narrative complexity nor depth of character to support. The conclusion attempts one more twist regarding Eve’s time in Phil’s holding cell—a situation she was obviously aware of, yet she acts in the final scene like this is the first time she’s realizing it as well. “This whole night’s been a bad fucking idea,” Eve says midway through, as if that wasn’t already evident to the audience by this point.
