



aka The Hunting Trip

Dir. Richard Gardner





The marketing of exploitation films is an art in and of itself. It is also something one must be wary of. The posters and home video cover art for 80’s genre cinema are awesome to behold; snapshots from neon-soaked universe of kinetic madness deserving of appreciation for their own sake. But more often than not, expectations are being set too high for the movies housed within, and with good reason. Most of these movies aren’t very good by any popular metric. It the covers were altered to be more accurate depictions for the films they advertise, these videos would rarely get picked up off the self, so I guess you can argue that false advertising is a necessary evil. But boy is it frustrating, making the search for solid trash boil down to what is essentially a numbers game. There are some trash movies that are as awesome as their cover art suggests, but they are few and far between. So tempering one’s expectations is an absolute imperative; the rule of thumb being the more awesome the cover art is, the lamer the movie will ultimately be. When you accept that what you see is not what you’re going to get, disappointment is minimized. Still though, some covers are so egregiously misleading, so shamelessly deceitful, that you have to laugh, or cry, or scream at the evil bastards who dreamed up such a con. Deadly Daphne’s Revenge is not a horror movie. It’s barely even a thriller. It’s a legal drama bookended by two sequences of mild genre elements. Oh, and Daphne has, if I’m being generous, about 7 minutes of screen time. The rest of the film is scenes of people talking. It should all be very boring, but somehow the film is oddly engaging. I wouldn’t call it compelling or entertaining per se, but there was something about it that just kept me from falling asleep through it.





Four men are headed for a weekend hunting trip out in the wilderness. Charlie, outspoken racist, misogynist, and anti-Semite, Bobo, Charlie’s employee and general blank slate, Bruce, Charlie’s cowardly insurance agent, and Steve (writer-director Richard Gardner), a teacher, and Charlie’s half brother, our de facto protagonist because he voices mild opposition to Charlie’s vehement rhetoric. Along the way they pick up underage hitchhiker Cindy and promptly start offering her alcohol. Steve again voices mild concern, but takes no action to remedy the situation. Charlie makes a detour to his nearby cabin in an attempt to bed Cindy, who is immediately repulsed by the man. Steve, white knight that he is, provides a buffer between Cindy and his angry half brother so that she may drink and smoke weed in relative peace. After Charlie passes out, Steve leads the girl upstairs where she asks him not to leave in case Charlie comes for her. She then makes a move on him and the two have sex. It’s ok though cause Cindy is mature and turning 18 in a week... Once Cindy falls asleep, Steve promptly leaves. Sometime later, Charlie wakes up and heads upstairs with Bobo and rapes Cindy, who escapes afterward into the forest. If this all seems like a set up for every rape-revenge thriller you’ve ever seen, hang on for a left turn...into a lawyer’s office, where Cindy looks to file charges against Charlie and Bobo.





The rest of the movie deals with the fallout of the legal proceedings and it’s effect on Cindy and the men, but mostly the men. The poor treatment of Cindy by everyone is so over the top that for a few brief moments it almost seems like the film is trying to make a comment on how the judicial system fails female survivors of sexual assault when it’s revealed that the DA has a personal grudge against Charlie and is manipulating Cindy’s case in order to punish Charlie as much as possible. But mostly the movie’s treatment of Cindy just feels like victim blaming, especially when Steve explicitly blames her for consuming the drugs given to her by Charlie and partying with him on the night of the assault. Furthermore the film lays guilt and blame on Cindy when Bruce, who was not involved in the assault, but still hanging out with her with his lecherous buddies, kills himself after his wife leaves him due to the negative impact Cindy’s accusation has on his image. It’s the kind of gross misinterpretation of the factors at play that’s right at home in an 80’s (technically filmed in ’79) exploitation movie, but it’s gross nonetheless. Anyways, the plot takes a turn when Charlie uses a vague mob connection to order a hit on Cindy that leads Steve to take her to the cabin where it all began so they can hide out and wait for things to blow over. And it ends on a relative high note when Daphne finally makes her appearance. But it’s too little too late.





So where does the value in Deadly Daphne’s Revenge lie? It’s not fun, it’s not nuanced, it doesn’t have anything important to say, and it’s severely antiquated in it’s social politics. So how did it keep my attention? There is a lot of joy in watching the aggressive performances, particularly that of Anthony Holt as the over the top caricature of Charlie, a man so blatantly, unabashedly evil that he comes off more as the creation of some sort of shock comic then he does a piece of a serious dramatic production. Gardner provides an explanation for Charlie’s hatred for women and people of color, but it’s just as tenuous as all the other ideas presented in the film. Aside from Charlie, there’s also a lot of clumsy dialogue to chuckle at. Again none of it is really entertaining, but somehow it’s still a very watchable 90 minutes. Deadly Daphne’s Revenge has very little Daphne, very little revenge, and not that much death. It’s a legal procedural with an antiquated world view that Troma tricked people into picking up off the video shelf in the heyday of VHS. And depending on your tolerance for tedium, it’ll either leave you laughing, scratching your head, or shrugging your shoulders.









Oh, and James Avery, Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, shows up for a minute as the detective who arrests Charlie (he also happens to be Daphne’s brother), and he chews the scenery gloriously.











