EVEN LAMBS HAVE TEETH -- Movie Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 5/7/17

 

If you're partial to rape-revenge movies but I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is just too serious and downbeat, you'll probably love EVEN LAMBS HAVE TEETH (2015).  It's kind of like a Romy and Michele movie if Romy and Michele got abducted and forced into prostitution, and then escaped and started killing everybody.

Things start out with a definite tongue-in-cheek tone as ditzy blondes Sloan (Kirsten Prout, ELEKTRA, THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE) and Katie (Tiera Skovbye) make their way into the heart of Yokelvania to work at a "community supported agricultural farm" for a month just to earn enough money to spend a weekend shopping in New York.

But the film takes a serious turn on the way to the farm when these borderline farcical characters meet up with a couple of semi-handsome country boys who give them a ride in their pickup and take them home to meet Mother (Gwynyth Walsh, best known as Klingon sister "B'Etor Duras" in STAR TREK: GENERATIONS).

 

Two drugged cups of java later, Sloan and Katie are chained inside a couple of cargo containers in a field somewhere while a procession of horny hillbillies pay to have sex with them. None of them, needless to say, is a prize, but the worst is the grunting psycho in the pig mask. (His identity is one of the film's best surprises.)

This traumatic sequence is when the movie is at its most hopeless and grim, since a good rape-revenge flick must build up sufficient "hate points" against the bad guys for us to welcome seeing them get theirs in the most horrible ways possible. 

Which, of course, is exactly what happens when the girls manage to escape on the eve of their "retirement" and, after a fun-filled shopping spree at a hardware store, they go after their erstwhile captors and customers with a manic, bloodthirsty glee.  (And I'm not even giving anything away since all of this is right there in the trailer.)



EVEN LAMBS HAVE TEETH is directed by Terry Miles, who previously gave us such films as STAGECOACH: THE TEXAS JACK STORY and LONESOME DOVE CHURCH.  From its first moments--a pleasantly amusing main titles sequence which bodes well for the film's technical merits--it easily maintains a breezy watchability throughout its length, with good performances all around.

Michael Karl Richards ("Stargate: Universe") co-stars as Katie's uncle Jason, an FBI agent investigating the girls' disappearance, while Craig March is backwoods slime personified as the crooked Sheriff March.  The rest of the cast is filled with plenty of colorful yokel-types, some merely comical and others richly deserving the horrible deaths in store for them.

Naturally, Sloan and Katie's rip-roarin' rampage of revenge is this Twinkie's sweet cream filling and it doesn't disappoint.  It may not be quite as gory as you'd imagine, but it's still plenty splattery and the girls display both a giggly industriousness and lots of imagination as they go about their bloody business, hacking their way up the slime chain right to the top--Mother and her two rotten sons--for the film's lively, satisfying climax. 

While not exactly world-shaking or terribly original, EVEN LAMBS HAVE TEETH is a candy-coated revenge romp that's as much fun as a box of glazed donuts.  Splattered with blood, that is.