A first viewing of something as hopelessly over-hyped as "Thriller--A Cruel Picture" is a guaranteed setup for disappointment on some level--I'm just stunned that it failed to deliver on ANY level. In the opening scene, a little girl is raped by an oogy old man, is rendered mute by the experience, and develops into a Lolita-esquire teen living on her grandparents' farm; one day she misses a bus and is accosted by a well-dressed man who's really an upscale pimp; the pimp cuts out her left eye when she refuses a john, and then becomes compliant, saving up her cash for karate/shooting/self-defense lessons, weapons, and heroin (the pimp's got her hooked, you see). What should have been a rollicking descent into madness and bloody revenge is instead a film that can't decide whether it wants to play at the artsy art-house or the sleazy grindhouse. "Thriller"'s shootouts and fistfights are filmed in (extreme) slo-mo, scored to bizarre ambient music--this technique might have carried an effect if we could relate to the heroine, but since we can't, it remains a purely aesthetic device that's all about broken bones, blood spatters, and boring the audience. The characters are shallow contrivances of the plot--we are given no reason to relate to anyone, and even our heroine (despite her distinctive eye-patch and black-leather "Matrix" garb) is an empty, unlikeable cipher, which is probably "Thriller"'s greatest flaw: even the crudest of '70s revenge pics (the superior "I Spit on Your Grave" and "Ms. 45" come to mind) manage to put us on the victim's side, even if we cannot completely condone their actions. As directed by Bo A. Vibenus, "Thriller" is a film distinctive only for its heavily stylized look and emotionally detached tone; the flirtations with such outré content as drug addiction, prostitution (including some pornographic inserts), and eye-for-an-eye revenge fall flat as a result. Too bad--this really could have been something exceptional. Instead, it's the type of film '70s college students probably bragged to their friends about seeing in an attempt to look "cool."