The Day Of Love

When you think of Russian cinema, what do you think of? Eisenstein? Tarkovsky? Surely, not cliched rape/revenge masterpieces of shit! Well, every country is guilty of at least one, and Russia is no exception with this one, which is pretty by-the-numbers. The story involves a crime syndicate that is about to rob a huge shipment of trucks, but to distract the police, they decide to hold their own ‘love day’ where the teenage thugs that work for them will go on and rape every woman they can find. And so it finally happens, and they rape everything, particularly underage girls in fairs and department stores. One of the women that gets raped is you Christina, who just won a beauty pageant. As you can imagine, neither she or her family are very happy about it. Her dad and her stepfather, who have an uneasy relationship, decide to join together and commit some brutal 80’s revenge on the gang of thugs and their leader.

This movie has a lot of homages to 80’s action movies, particularly the ones of Silvester Stallone. In one scene, we see Christina and her friend watching the end of Cobra, when Stallone impales a guy and sends him to a burning furnace. Great death scene, of course, but here not only do they show it on the tv, but the parents do the same thing to the leader of the angry teenagers! I mean, is this a tribute or a ripoff? Well it’s always a ripoff unless it’s Tarantino, then the film geeks kiss his ass forever for imitating. Other deaths in this steel mill include a guy who gets choked by a machine, and another dude who has his arm crushed. Awesome stuff, but sadly that’s the end of the awesomeness when it comes to this movie. The rest of the deaths, particularly the one of the leader of the gang, is very anti-climactic and leaves you wishing for more.

The main negative point, however, comes in the rape scenes. They’re not explicit at all and, while we do get some breast action, it’s not very impressive. If there’s something that ever exploitation rape/revenge film should have is extensive nudity, and the filmmakers of this piece of crap decided to rob us of it as well. This movie is not worth recommending, as it fails in most of it’s exploitative moments, has little nudity and the violence can be seen in better detail in Stallone’s Cobra. So rent Cobra, then watch Savage Streets, instead of watching this piece of shit.