"The Defilers": A Grammatically Acrobatic Film Review

While its sick violence and rampant mysogyny is unrepentant, "The Defilers" plays like nothing so much as a David Lynch film, with its themes exposing the brutal perversion underneath the sweet, sweeping soundtrack strings. However, this film has the added benefit of being ACTUALLY of the cinematic period that Lynch so lovingly and painstakingly recreates. The first blush of "anyone with a camera and a few friends" making their own small-scale masterpieces. It's just that "The Defilers" is of that era's "just give 'em sex and violence" exploitation wave. It's the air of low-budget, Golden Age Of Hollywood aspirations, combined with a punk rock sense of "cut the shit, get to the good stuff" that makes it riveting. However, it's the under-trained but highly ambitious cinematography, combined with the aforementioned collision of graphic thrills, faux-Hollywood glamor (and the attendant campy low-budget production value, acting included), and the disconcerting is-it-real-or-just-for-shock saturation of sadism, sexism and violence, that makes it damn near psychedelic.