Movie Review: 'Scavenger' is One of the Worst Movies Ever Made THAT'S NOT A REASON TO SEE IT

Scavenger is among the most ugly, nasty and genuinely unpleasant movies I’ve ever endured. I hate saying that, I know I should not open the review with that. I know that people who release a movie as ugly and vile as Scavenger love for critics to say how awful they are, they consider a negative review such as this as good publicity. I hate that fact but I can’t put this lightly or simply dismiss the revulsion I felt while watching Scavenger.

Scavenger is supposed to be a movie directed by Luciana Garraza and Eric Fleitas. I say ‘supposed to be a movie’ because having seen it, I didn’t really feel as if I had seen a movie. Rather, there is an assemblage of dirty, degraded, out of focus images that seem to be in some semblance of order and packaged under a title, but the term ‘movie’ is only loosely applied to whatever Scavenger is.

Ostensibly, Scavenger is the story of The Butcher, played by Nayra Churruarin. As a teenager, her family home was overrun by a gang of savages dressed in Mad Max cosplay. The gang raped and murdered her mother, murdered her father and stole his organs to sell as meat, and kidnapped her baby sister for purposes not to be speculated upon here. Having escaped the savage gang, our unnamed protagonist grows up to become a Butcher, someone who hunts down bad guys and cuts them up to be served as cannibal lunch meat.

To be clear, that’s what the plot appears to be. Much of what I have written is inferred on my part. My brain worked desperately to cohere the nonsense on screen into something that resembled a story being told. The reality on screen resembles what I have described but only after a logical mind has forced it into a form that resembles sense. Let me tell you dear reader, it was an exhausting task. Trying to make Scavenger make sense is, to steal a bit from Bill Hicks, ‘like teaching a dog a card trick.’ a pointless endeavor.

"Mad Max by way of a dime store Halloween costume meets Natural Born Killers, if that movie were directed by someone even less coherent than Oliver Stone."

Making sense of Scavenger is pointless because I am hopeful, through this review, to encourage you not to waste your precious time watching the vile, nasty incomprehensible ugliness that is Scavenger. This is not a bad movie the way The Room is a bad movie. It's not fun to watch at the expense of the movie or poignant for the agonizing failure on display. This is not a bad movie in the way Adam Sandler makes a bad movie, Scavenger is bad in ways that have no redeeming qualities. I may dislike Mr Sandler’s work but his unfunny meandering is infinitely superior to the soul-sucking emptiness of Scavenger. Sandler may not be funny or engaging but he's not actively hateful toward the audience as the makers of Scavenger appear to be.

Fair warning: The next section of this review will discuss, as briefly as possible sexual assault as it is portrayed in Scavenger, i.e poorly and with only the intent of causing hurt and offense. The makers of Scavenger wield sexual violence as a weapon to offend and shock you. Weasels will try and hide behind how awful real life assault is and pretend that they are portraying it honestly because of course sexual violence is never with purpose other than causing harm. Don't buy into it. The sexual violence of Scavenger is there to shock you, to make you talk about this awful movie in ways that might pique curiosity. Sexual violence as marketing.

I Really Hate This Movie

The middle portion of Scavenger, I can’t call it the second act because that would imply that anything here has any structure to it, is set inside a post-apocalyptic brothel. Our protagonist has been told that the man who murdered her family operates out of this brothel. While she’s there, the protagonist is drugged and sexually assaulted by a female sex worker. She’s then shackled to a bed, urinated on by male patrons and then sexually assaulted more than once.

This section of the film is one of the most vile, disgusting, exploitative and ugly things ever committed to film. Perhaps some will argue that all sexual assaults are vile, disgusting, exploitative and ugly and that is certainly true. But, a real sexual assault is not filmed for entertainment purposes. The makers of Scavenger have filmed this endless, dire, sequence for the purpose of shocking and appalling. Congratulations, I’m disgusted. Why is this something you wanted to show the world?

There is a twist as well, just to further the shock factor, the female sex worker who drugs and assaults the protagonist is eventually revealed to be her little sister who was kidnapped years earlier. No, I didn’t say spoiler alert. I don’t care if I spoil Scavenger. How can I spoil something that is already so very, very rotten. I will reserve plot discretion to actual movies and not for random assemblages of footage intended to offend and cause retching.

Usually, I would use this spot in the review to tell you when you can find Scavenger but instead, I want to say, don’t bother looking for Scavenger. Instead, peel that thing off of the bottom of your shoe and stare it at for 77 minutes, that's the equivalent experience of watching Scavenger. It’s available but it’s not worth your time. Spend time with friends, go outside, do your taxes, get a haircut. Do anything other than pay money to watch Scavenger. The title is so generic anyway that finding it on streaming sites is far too much of a chore anyway.