Assault (1973)

And I have to change my score from 7 to 6. It's been quite some time since I saw this film under the same title on an old VHS from my local video library. That was some 20 odd years ago.Some scenes seem different to me now. The rapes are vivid and quite alarming, and they don't look like they have changed those scenes at all since last viewing this. Leslie Anne Down did a marvelous job of playing Tessa the first victim who can not speak or, do much else after being attacked. Understandable of course.There is one scene I remember, even from my first viewing of this of a girl in the school library and the headmistress' sleazy husband. She asks him to, and I quote "could you steady me?" I'm thinking this translates to helping her stand on the chair. But he holds her with both hands on her waist, and as she stands then proceeds to move his hands along the curve of her hips and then push her skirt up... You see that in the scene then as his hand gets high they cut to her face with her looking down with a puzzling expression. It looks like a half smile on her face, as if she either doesn't care what is going on or might even like it. Anyway the scene is gross...Overall the movie tries to be serious, the only serious part is what happens to poor Tessaa played by Lesley Ann Down.... In the end the rapist finds her again right before the film ends but he is dispatched in the most silly manner that I can recall ever seeing.So after watching this today I don't think I'd give it another go. Pass and put this DVD in the bin.

... not to mention before political correctness too. This could never be made today because now we know rape is about power, not sex. But in this film, it's all about sex, sex, sex. It's the original schoolgirl fetish film, a precursor to those Japanese tentacle films, except without tentacles.If you've read the summary, you'd know some pervert is raping schoolgirls in the woods. And killing some too. Why one girl goes through the woods directly after the first rape I dunno. Anyway it's a big mystery, and every guy is a suspect. This film has a lot of alternate titles, mostly dealing with Satan because the schoolteacher who saw the perpetrator said he "looked like Satan". Lesley Anne-Down (or however you spell it) is the lovely and barely legal (17 at the time) first victim.Okay, you've read this far, you know there's a spoiler warning, you must really wanna know something. Like who did it. It was Anthony Ainley's character. Yup. The old Master himself is the evil rapist. Who's really surprised, huh? Now excuse me, I think I'll go hop a TARDIS back to 1971 and stand in the woods while wearing a schoolgirl outfit. Aww yeah.

Although any number of Italian gialli ("Nude Si Muore", "What Have You Done to Solange?", etc.) were set in Britain and/or were UK co-productions, this film is somewhat unique in that it seems to be a completely British giallo. We're definitely in giallo territory here: There's a vicious rapist-murderer on the loose at a girl's school. There are two witnesses to the murder--one who can't quite remember what she saw (a familiar plot-line in the Italian films)and a previous rape victim who is too traumatized to speak. The lead is Suzy Kendall, who two years earlier had starred in Dario Argento's seminal giallo "The Bird with Crystal Plumage." It's definitely a very British film, however. The cinematography is staid and workman-like compared to the more garish and stylistic Italian films. The plot is fairly linear and logical, at least until the end when the murderer-rapist goes to laughably ridiculous lengths to stop a psychiatrist from giving sodium pentathlon to the traumatized victim to help her recover her memory.It's not surprising given the famed British aversion to violence (in movies that is)that most of the violence here takes place off-screen. Still it is pretty nasty violence, especially considering the rape angle and the age and gender of the victims. (It's interesting that these kinds of movies never take place at a MEN'S college or in an old age home). The sex and nudity is also pretty non-existent, but it doesn't exactly seem wholesome either the way they have cast sexy twenty year olds as fifteen year olds and dressed them in mini-skirts short enough to get any real schoolgirl expelled. The most lurid scene involves the headmistress's lecherous husband and a student librarian on a ladder. I don't know if it makes it more or less perverse that the "student" is played by Janet Lynn, a British sex star of the period (thus the obvious pseudonym)who had been featured the year before in Pete Walker's naked sex romp "Cool It, Carol". The only really recognizable star though, besides Suzy Kendall, is a young Leslie-Anne Down as the traumatized rape victim. (Despite what an earlier reviewer said, Jenny Agutter is NOT in this movie).Still if you can get around the leering British hypocrisy, the relative lack of sex and violence, and the fairly low-wattage of the star power, this is actually a pretty entertaining little film, and, if nothing else, an interesting one.

Too much talk and too little of the right kind of action, for me. But the talk is delivered capably; the sex is maximally restrained; and the gore is maturely, practically non-existent. The police in this story believably - albeit boringly - strive to come up with the identity of who, among a few possibilities, is the rapist? You're gonna hafta rent the movie to find out. That would be OK if it doesn't cost very much. But buy it only if that does not exceed the price of renting. My impression was: a little less than mediocre.