Scavenger is that rarity – a post-apocalyptic wannabe-grindhouse exploitation movie filmed in Argentina. It’s a subgenre that sadly isn’t rare enough; Scavenger is a horrible, nasty, vile, grubby little film that runs for just over seventy minutes but every painful, badly-directed and written minute – no, make that second - feels like a lifetime spent in absolute, unbearable purgatory in the company of ghastly, repellent, misogynistic foul-mouthed lowlife scumbags.
Let’s get this over with. In some tediously low-rent Mad Max post-apoc wilderness we meet Tisha (Nayla Churruarin), a wild and dangerous loner who tracks down other loners, slaughters them and sells their corpses as meat to feed the survivors in a starving, arid world. She’s a tortured soul, tormented by some terrible family trauma from her youth. She meets up with – and is abused by – a stripper named Luna (Sofia Lanaro) and she finds herself a prisoner in what can only be described as a rape club where she is repeatedly violently violated by hideous, stinking, fetid excuses for mankind. These over-extended sequences are ugly and hideous to watch; there’s no morality here, just unnecessarily graphic and painful physical violence just for the sake of it and for pure shock value.
Directors Eric Fleitas and Luciana Garraza have created a bog-standard (in every conceivable sense of the expression) revenge thriller and filled it with filth, foul characters and poorly executed violence. Scavenger is scuppered not only by its own inexcusable sleaziness, but it’s also not helped by the terrible production design and a budget that won’t even stretch to making its unpalatable world convincing. The whole thing looks as if it was flung together with bits and pieces salvaged from a rubbish tip (where we can only assume the script was also exhumed) with desperate-for-a-credit actors dragged in from amateur porn videos. It’s hard to imagine that even aficionados of torture porn and grindhouse cinema will find anything to redeem this stomach-churning monstrosity. Fleitas and Garraza might be minded to defend their ‘work’ as a study in the depths humanity can sink to in desperate, stricken times but we’re calling shenanigans on that one.
We admire anyone who can marshall the resources and energy to actually get a film made but there are times when the effort just isn’t worth it and the end result is so shockingly unappealing and bereft of creative merit that it deserves nothing but contempt and dismissal and absolutely nothing in the way of recommendation. We’re tempted to give this one a zero rating but it earns itself one star purely by virtue of the fact that it could have gone on a lot longer and ruined even more of our day. Please… avoid at all costs and don’t even let your curiosity get the better of you. Scavenger is truly appalling.
Scavenger is available on Blu-ray (with the soundtrack CD) and VOD in the US.
