Thriller.En.grym.film.1973.Uncut.Extended.RM4k.VS.1080p.BluRay.x265.hevc.10bit.AAC.2.0.dual.commentary.V2-HeVK.mkv

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973) aka Thriller - en grym film aka They Call Her One-Eye, directed by Bo Arne Vibenius, fully uncut unrated festival version, V2, Vinegar Syndrome 4k remaster, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including original Swedish theatrical stereo, English stereo dub, commentary track, and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072285/

Video encoded in two-pass 11.5 Mbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image.

Audio encoded separately with Apple AAC for the highest-quality AAC sound available.

English subtitles for Swedish audio OCRed, proofed and corrected. English SDH subtitles for English dub converted to VobSub and repositioned.

Note : I had already done this, but there were some framerate issues, so here it is again, with bumped video and audio quality as well.

This Swedish exploitation classic is famous for many things, none of them particularly savory. Perhaps the most innocent is that its one-eyed heroine inspired the character of Elle Driver in Tarantino's Kill Bill, but others are more interesting, such as the director wanting to make "The most commercial film ever made" after losing money on a previous production, that the recently liberalized Swedish pornography laws inspired the producers to splice in a bunch of honest to god X-rated hardcore porn close-ups (presumably with stand-ins), including anal sex and ejaculation, to make the film even more attractive to audiences, that the actress was injected with saline solution on camera to simulate shooting heroin, or that the infamous eye-gouging scene, which looks unsettlingly real, was performed on a real human corpse. All of these things seem likely, and the result is an exploitation extravaganza that belies its small-country origins, and which also contains what's to my knowledge film history's only training, fucking, & heroin-shooting montage.

Madeleine is raped as a child, and as a result ends up mute. Now a teenager, she's taken from her rural home where she lives with her parents by pimp Tony, who treats her to dinner and alcohol, and when she passes out, shoots her up with heroin to make her addicted, then puts her to work as a prostitute. When she resists her first client, he gouges her eye out with a scalpel, and he sends hateful letters to her parents in her name to make them think she ran away. Madeleine discovers that the letters made both her parents commit suicide, and she vows revenge, using all her saved-up money to train in martial arts, firearms, and that essential Scandinavian pastime, rally driving, and goes on a roaring rampage of revenge. She kills all the johns who abused her, then moves on to Tony's thugs, and finally Tony himself, all the while wreaking havoc in the Swedish countryside with car chases and fights with the police, while the filmmakers wreak havoc with excessive slow motion, weird sound design, and breaking the axis.

This is quite a good remaster, except for the extreme grain, which it seems was just left the way it came off of the 16mm negative. I've done a very conservative grain reduction (the grain is still much more prominent than in most films) before encoding, which helped with the required bitrate. Both the original Swedish soundtrack and the English dub sound fine (but, as usual, just watch with the original sound and subtitles), and the commentary track with Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is pretty great, including a overview of rape-revenge films and the topic of rape in exploitation film in general.

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Note from HeVK