La extraña venganza de Rosalie

Childish and slightly unhinged Rosalie imprisons hapless jewelry salesman Virgil in her dusty farm.Poor guy is strapped to an iron bed after Rosalie has broken his leg with the back end of an axe.Suddenly a demented biker appears and they both find themselves dominated and tormented by him...I am fairly sure that after watching "The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie" Stephen King took the main idea to write his bestselling novel "Misery".Bonnie Bedelia is excellent as the uneducated,naive and aggressive captor.The final twist is rather silly,but I liked dry and utterly remote desert setting.The film was cut by the studio to achieve the desired PG rating.Thankfully I managed to see all the nude scenes censored from American release.8 out of 10.Very rare 70's film from director Jack Starrett of "Race with the Devil" fame.

Since my fifty years as a movie buff, I had never heard of this Jack Starett's movie. He who is one of my favorite seventies director. This one shows us Bonnie Bedelia sixteen years before she becomes Mrs Holy - Generro - McLane in DIE HARD, and several years after her performance in THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY. This is a strange but not uninteresting film, that can make you think of MISERY in terms of scheme and settings; isolation and more or less disturbed characters. I am very happy to have discovered this little gem. I still don't uderstand how this film could remain under my radars.....

A true obscurity. Most of the user comments reference its unmistakable similarity to MISERY. In Stephen King's defense (not that I'm a huge King fan, nor is the author above "homages" to previous works), even ROSALIE can't be said to have broken new ground with its theme of a woman keeping a man "hostage" (Don Siegel's BEGUILED with Clint Eastwood came out just a year before, for instance). And, the film is OBSCURE. I had to find it on the dark corners of the internet to find an import VHS - with Dutch subtitles to boot (anybody who NEEDS to see this can email me).

A virtual three person show with Bedelia and Howard on screen for virtually the entire running time (Anthony Zerbe shows is the 3rd main actor, though his part is much smaller). The odd perverse atmosphere helps a lot, but there is little in the way of action or psychological insight. Bedelia is not altogether convincing as a Native American, but she truly carries the film with her portrait of a deeply disturbed young woman. At times, the script doesn't seem consistent as to whether Rosalie is totally naive, or whether she is merely cunning. With some things, she appears to have NO understanding of the wider world, but at other times, she keeps up with the well bred Virgil. The twist ending works on one level, but carries little meaning.

Considering that the indie film was originally distributed by 20th Century Fox and that all three of the stars are name actors, it remains a "strange" mystery why this film seems to have vanished. Perhaps, Rosalie's ultimate vengeance?

Richard (Ken Howard) is very clean and white in comparison to a brown and dusty landscape filled with brown, dusty people. He stands out like a cultivated plant in a wild desert garden. Rosalie is the girl you, at times, feel sorry for and, at times, are just simply disgusted with. Bonnie Bedelia does a wonderful job of playing her with a very hard stubborn edge that can drive you crazy. You will leave this movie feeling bewildered and frustrated to all hell.

This is a film from the early 70's that I watched in the early 80's, it wasn't a new movie, but it wasn't dated for the time either, on the contrary, in the 80's I was a teenager and the feeling I had was that the films from the previous decade (70s) were more impactful on me than those from the current decade (80s). Many of the most memorable films of my life belong to the period 1966-1974, and I watched most of them in my adolescence.

With this film it was no different, I watched it one late night on the couch at my house in the early 80's and it was like a punch in the stomach. I can give other examples, such as "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" (1966), "Midnight Cowboy" (1969), "Brewster McCloud" (1970), "Straw Dogs" (1971), "The Beguiled" (1971), "Deliverance" (1972), "The Wicker Man" (1973), "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" (1974), and many others, the list is huge.

I never rewatched "The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie" after that, so I'm pretty sure if I were to watch it today I would find it to be a pretty bad and outdated movie. And for that very reason I prefer not to watch it again, because I prefer to keep in myself the unique and devastating feeling it caused me at the time, which puts the film among the most memorable of my life.

This film was so impactful that when I watched the release of "Misery" (1990) in theaters, I thought it was rubbish, a great disappointment, because the origin of the inspiration was evident and even a certain plagiarism in the story, until today the film of Rob Reiner doesn't get down my throat very much. Okay, everyone can claim nowadays that "Misery" is a much better movie, better made, with better actors, etc, but for those who knew the illustrious unknown original B movie that probably served as inspiration for that Stephen King story , none of these better elements are enough to elevate it to the heights of a superior film.

That's it, so if you like small and simple old productions, different and obscure, with a high degree of suspense and tension, "The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie" is a full plate.