 Dir. Terry Miles, 78 mins, Canada/FrancE A new year is upon us, and of course that brings new and exciting possibilities and the prospect of intriguing new developments for Film Gutter. What cinematic madness lies ahead for this year? Will there be another film to absolutely break me before the closing credits? Yes, the excitement is boundless as 2019 begins... ...with a rape revenge movie. Yes, new possibilities indeed. I've written a little about this subject before, but it's very hard to do something different and exciting in this subgenre. There have been a handful – movies like Julia, Landmine Goes Click or American Mary leap to mind – but the name of the milieu gives away the plot right away. You know that someone is going to get raped in the first part of the movie, and then they are going to get their revenge. The mould hasn't changed a great deal since I Spit On Your Grave, and nor can it really, since the description applied to it is so limiting. Which brings us to Even Lambs Have Teeth, a 2015 offering from Terry Miles that follows friends Katie and Sloane about to go off and work at an eco-farm near their uncle while one of their mums (honestly didn't catch which one it was) goes off to Cuba. A slightly random opening, but of course it isn't long before the girls decide not to wait around for the bus to the farm, instead taking a lift from two handsome strangers. Then they find themselves drugged and waking up in the middle of the forest in a shipping container. From there a host of men from around the local area come to visit and abuse our lead characters over an unspecified amount of time (which I think amounts to a few days). This leads me to one of the main problems about the movie, in that things do feel a bit too vague to really connect home. Something like I Spit On Your Grave made an emotional connection by showing in quite shocking detail the attack on our lead, and when she inflicted the equally brutal revenge there was a kind of catharsis there – it offered a certain degree of satisfaction to see. There are plenty of hints and intimations of what happens to our lead characters here, but nothing much is ever shown in any detail, so you do feel slightly cut adrift. Strangely the same goes for the revenge, which again on numerous occasions hints at real brutality but somehow seems to duck short of the issue. If this was a deliberate decision it doesn't feel like one that helps, although of course it may have been cuts or restrictions of some variety there too. I always try and take into account I'm not a big fan of these kind of films when reviewing, and barring the above issue there's not really a massive amount wrong with this one. The performances from our two main actresses are solid, and fit the story well, and I was pretty partial to the soundtrack that ran throughout the movie. Unfortunately the male characters in the film feel seriously underdeveloped – some of them I couldn't even remember when the girls mete out their vengeance – which again gives the film a somehow unsatisfying resolution, and the tendency to go for a few too many cute one-liners also feels a little excessive. Maybe it's in some parts an attempt to satirise some of the other examples of the field, but it doesn't really hit home. RATING: 5.5/10. Even Lambs Have Teeth is a decent rape revenge movie that is likely to hit the mark well enough for fans of the subgenre, but for me it all just feels a bit too comfortable and familiar to be deeply memorable. It's not brutal and bloody enough to be a serious standout on that front, and the emotional context and connection feels a bit undercooked. It runs a relatively short runtime, and I wonder if another 10 or 15 minutes to load up on those two things could have helped. Some likeable performances aren't quite enough to save this one, so it's a distinctly middling 5.5/10 for this one. 
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