"They took her body. She'll take their souls."
Savaged is a 2013 action-horror film directed by Michael S. Ojeda.
A white deaf girl is murdered by rednecks. An Apache spirit possesses her body and hunts them down one by one.
The film has the alternate title of Avenged.
This film contains examples of:
- And I Must Scream: Hoo boy. Zoe is dead, and her soul is trapped inside her decaying corpse with the angry ghost of an Apache war chief.
- Arch-Enemy:
- Zoe has Trey, the leader of the gang of rednecks who raped and murdered her.
- The Apache chief has Trey's grandfather, who killed him and his entire tribe a long time ago.
- Beat Still, My Heart: During the showdown at the mine, Zoe kills Wes, and then emerges from behind cover and extends his still beating heart towards Trey.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. By the end of the movie, Zoe is a rotting, maggot-infested mess barely held together by duct tape and the pissed-off ghost of an Apache chieftain.
- Big Bad: Trey, the primary target of Zoe's wrath.
- Bittersweet Ending: Zoe is dead, but so are Trey and his gang; and Dane and Grey Wolf survive.
- Black-and-Gray Morality: Trey and his gang are sadistic, racist serial killers and rapists. The Apache chief is a wrathful phantom willing to resort to brutal war tactics and trap a young woman in a Fate Worse than Death to avenge the genocide of his people. Zoe's a pretty reasonable person but is treated horrifically by both.
- Body Horror: Zoe unwraps the crude bandages around her wrists and sees maggots crawling in her rotting flesh. Her horrified screams make it even worse.
- Bows and Errors: Zoe finds a recurve bow and quiver of arrows in a barn and takes it with her and uses it on her Roaring Rampage of Revenge. However, the bow had been stored strung and, according to its owner, had been in the barn for months. This would have ruined the tension in the bow and rendered it useless.
- Came Back Wrong: Grey Wolf attempts to bring Zoe back from the dead. The ritual succeeds, but she comes back sharing her body with an angry Apache spirit who sends her on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
- Car Fu: Trey and his gang use their pickup to run down a couple of Indians: a crime which Zoe witnesses. Later, they run over Zoe after she is thrown from the back of the truck.
- Chainsaw Good: Trey chooses to wield a chainsaw as his weapon in his final showdown against Zoe.
- Cop Killer: Zoe's first victim is a deputy sheriff, one of her rapists. As a result, it's sympathetic. Even so, all his colleagues react with realistic zeal (the sheriff is completely oblivious to his criminal side, viewing him as a good man and deputy).
- Duct Tape for Everything: Zoe uses duct tape to patch up her rotting body as it slowly falls apart.
- Electromagnetic Ghosts: Zoe's presence at the mine causes the lights to flicker and various pieces of machinery to malfunction.
- Empowered Badass Normal: Zoe starts off badass enough to pull her hands out of barb-wire binds. Then she gets possessed by the ghost of an Apache chief and becomes strong enough to disembowel a man with a broken bottle.
- Grievous Bottley Harm: In the bar, Zoe snatches a beer bottle off Jed, smashes it, and uses it to (literally) gut him.
- Gutted Like a Fish: Zoe opens Jed up with a broken beer bottle and pulls his intestines out with her bare hands.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Following the final battle, Zoe has been cut in half at the waist by Trey's chainsaw, but—being a Revenant Zombie—still cannot die.
- Hate Sink: Trey is a redneck from a long line of anti-Native American serial killers. First introduced running his latest victim down with a truck, he abducts a deaf woman who witnessed the crime. After binding her with barbed wire, Trey rapes her before killing her to prevent police attention. After Zoe comes back with the help of an Apache ghost, Trey forces his friends to help him fight her on pain of death.
- The Hero Dies: Zoe is burnt to death in a Mercy Kill.
- High-Speed Hijack: When Trey and his gang abducts Dane, Zoe jumps into the back of their speeding truck and gets in a fight with Wes in the back of the truck.
- Historical Character's Fictional Relative: Trey is a descendant of Brigadier General Joseph R. West, the US officer who infamously murdered Apache leader Mangas Coloradas under a flag of truce and allowed the decapitation and desecration of his body. Trey keeps Mangas's skull in a cupboard and is attempting to follow in his ancestor's footsteps as a killer of Indians.
- Human Pincushion: Zoe shoots Creed with so many arrows that Trey describes him as being 'a human pincushion'.
- Javelin Thrower: Zoe kills Cody by throwing an Apache war lance throw the windscreen of his speeding car, and then ducking under the car as it flips and crashes.
- Kill It with Fire: The only way Dane can find to release Zoe from her Revenant Zombie state is to burn her to ashes.
- Literal Disarming: During the final showdown, Zoe cuts off Trey's hand with a knife. The severed hand remains clamped on the throttle of the chainsaw he is wielding, keeping it running.
- Magical Native American: Grey Wolf is a shaman who finds Zoe after she has been Left for Dead. He preforms a ritual in an attempt to bring her back, but she comes back wrong.
- Maligned Mixed Marriage: The rednecks are very disapproving of Zoe, who's white, being with Dane, her black fiancé. After they meet him, some cruelly joke that she must be colorblind.
- Mercy Kill: At the end of the movie, Dane finds Zoe, now Half the Woman She Used to Be but still unable to die, feebly trying to bury herself. To release her tortured soul, he incinerates her remains.
- Monster from Beyond the Veil: A Magical Native American attempts to bring Zoe back from the dead. He succeeds, but she returns with a passenger: the angry Ghost of the Apache chief Mangas Coloradas. The ghost sends her on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against both the men who raped and killed her and the descendants of the general who murdered him under a flag of truce.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: These are spirits who resemble their living forms surrounded by green gas, and they interact with the world by possessing dead bodies.
- Our Zombies Are Different: These are revenants resurrected by a spirit to take revenge, and their bodies don't stop rotting.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Trey wants to keep Zoe as a Sex Slave, but he kills her because her disappearance will bring extreme heat on him due to Missing White Woman Syndrome.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: The rednecks are very racist, calling Native Americans "savages" and "gut-eaters" and assuming Zoe is colorblind because she's dating a black man, who they call the n-word to his face.
- Racist Grandpa: Colby's father is a Korean War veteran who tells Dane (a black man) that his fiancée probably developed a new appreciation for the white man by being raped by Wes and his redneck cronies.
- Rape and Revenge: Zoe is raped by Trey and killed by West, gets resurrected with an Apache ghost, and butchers everybody involved.
- Revenant Zombie: Zoe is resurrected by a shaman, who accidentally causes her body to be possessed by ghosts. She's also rotting.
- Right Behind Me: Jed is sitting at the bar describing everything he did to Zoe (in the form of a hypothetical situation) when Zoe walks in behind him. He keeps talking for some time before Colby's horrified expression clues him in that something is wrong.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: After being raped and murdered by a gang of racist rednecks, a woman bonds with the ghost of an Apache chief who was killed by the leader's grandfather. Using her newfound knowledge of the chief's brutal war tactics, she guts and scalps her way through the gang.
- The Savage South
- Sense Freak: When deaf girl Zoe is resurrected and possessed by the spirit of an Apache warrior, she discovers that she can now hear. She becomes fascinated by sound, and she is especially entranced by an opera singer on the radio.
- Shoot Out the Lock: When Zoe's powers cause a door to slam in Wes's face and lock at the mine, Wes responds by blasting the door open with a shotgun.
- Shout-Out: Several to The Crow (1994), like the basic premise. There's also the scene where Zoe wraps her forearms and midsection in duct tape in an attempt to fix her wounds. Chief Red Sleeves's war paint also certainly counts.
- Slasher Film: One of the rare slasher films with a sympathetic protagonist due to the horrible crime committed against her by her victims.
- Two Shots from Behind the Bar: When Zoe attacks Jed in the bar, the bartender grabs a shotgun from behind the bar and starts desperately fumbling to load it. It does him no good.
- Verbed Title
- Voice of the Legion: Zoe speaks like this when she awakens after being possessed by the spirit.
- Who Needs Their Whole Body?: Following the final battle, Zoe is still functioning despite having been cut in half with a chainsaw. She drags herself into an open grave and starts trying to pull the soil down on top of herself. Her fiancé Dane finally preforms a Mercy Kill by setting fire to her.
