MOVE REVIEW : HYPOCRISY MARS ‘VENDETTA’

“Vendetta” (citywide) is your typically lurid, brutal women’s prison exploitation picture cranked a couple of notches above the usual, thanks to some terse, vivid acting under Bruce Logan’s dynamic direction.

When the younger sister (Michelle Newkirk) of Hollywood stunt woman Laurie Collins (Karen Chase) is wrongly imprisoned and then murdered for resisting the advances of the penitentiary’s sadistic, drug-dealing convict leader Kay (Sandy Martin), Collins gets herself sent up to exact revenge.

“Vendetta” could have been more entertaining were it not for two crucial, disturbing points. First, it’s well past time to lay to rest that staple of its genre, the evil lesbian predator stereotype. The film’s many writers have given Martin the best tough-talk lines, and she comes through with gleeful spunk; that the film is on the whole sensitive to other minorities only makes Kay seem all the more offensive. Second, the picture raises the question of the futility of revenge while unhesitatingly exploiting the violence that explodes between Laurie and Kay. Somehow, questioning the morality of revenge doesn’t sit easily in a film expressing such knee-jerk cynicism about our courts and our prisons.

The generally hypocritical tone of “Vendetta” might not be so bothersome were the film a raucous sendup rather than a straight-faced action picture. In short, if the makers of the film didn’t seem to take themselves quite so seriously we wouldn’t have to either. Worth taking seriously, however, is the clearly talented Bruce Logan, who in “Vendetta “ (rated an appropriate R) makes his feature directorial debut after considerable experience in special effects, cinematography, commercials and music videos.

‘VENDETTA’

A Concorde Pictures release of a Concorde/Chroma III Communications production. Producers Jeff Begun, Ken Solomon, Ken Dalton. Director Bruce Logan. Screenplay Emil Farkas, Simon Maskell, Laura Cavestani, John Adams. Camera Robert New. Music David Newman. Associate producers Richard Harrison, Greg Hinton. Costumes Meg Mayer. Stunt coordinator Emil Farkas. Second-unit camera Bryan Greenberg. Film editor Glenn Morgan. With Karen Chase, Sandy Martin, Roberta Collins, Kin Shriner.

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).