Complete with gratuitous hardcore insert shots and cadaver eyeball mutilation, 'Thriller–A Cruel Picture' certainly earns its reputation as a true exploitation classic. Unfortunately, a drawn out final third, featuring some clumsy action scenes and the occasional unintentionally funny moment, ultimately drains the movie of some of its power.
Beautiful Swedish star Christina Lindberg plays Madeleine, a young mute woman who is kidnapped, hooked on heroin, and then forced to work as a prostitute. After clawing her first customer in the face, she is punished by Tony, her sadistic captor, who, in a particularly nasty scene, uses a scalpel to blind her in one eye (this realistic moment was reputedly achieved with the use of an actual dead body!).
After her injury has healed, Madeleine returns to work, with an eye-patch to hide her injury, and reluctantly complies with Tony's demands, sexually satisfying a variety of sleazy clients (bonus sleaze points are awarded here for inter-cutting graphic penetration shots with those of Ms. Lindberg, to make it appear as though she took part in the adult action).
As a reward for her good behaviour, Madeleine is given two wraps of heroin a day, a percentage of her takings, and Monday's off (a pension plan is not offered!).
However, after the suspicious disappearance of her friend, fellow 'hooker' Sally (who vanishes, leaving behind a blood-soaked bed), the one-eyed, smack-addicted beauty decides to get even with Tony, her abusers, and anyone else who has given her grief. She spends her free days learning self-defence, extreme driving, and marksmanship, and, once she is proficient at all three, embarks on her mission to exact bloody revenge.
Everything that leads up to Madeleine eventually kicking ass is extremely well done and delightfully sordid, just as an exploitation film should be. The pace is leisurely at the beginning, but never bores, with the sex, drugs and violence all explicitly depicted. Plus, the delightful Lindberg spends a lot of her time naked.
Where Thriller does suffer is in its latter scenes, where a shotgun toting, leather-coat and eye-patch wearing Madeleine blasts her victims to kingdom come. Director Bo Arne Vibenius opts to film most of the shootings in such excruciatingly drawn-out slow motion that it's possible to pop out to the kitchen, fix a sarnie, make a pot of tea, and still get back to your seat before the body hits the floor. Imagine the gun-fights of Peckinpah or Woo at a quarter of the speed, but nowhere near as stylish, and you'll have an idea of what I mean.
A final act of revenge is set in a suitably bleak environment and ends the film as one would expect—with 'one-eye' settling the score with Tony, in a slow and painful manner. Madeleine is seen driving towards the horizon as the credits roll.
