He slices her eye out when she tries to escape; after that, she doesn't try to escape. It's tough to adjust to the whorin' (a few unexpected hardcore scenes are included to bolster the shock value, though this isn't out-and-out porno), but Frigga deals with the humiliation by bonding with a fellow white slave. Until they kill her, too. Somehow (it's not explained), she is eventually able to get out on her day off, and upon returning to her hometown, she learns that her distraught parents have killed themselves, so Frigga begins plotting her revenge. Using the plentiful cash she's skimmed, she spends all her days off receiving training in driving, martial arts, and using guns! Why she doesn't just use the cash and one of the days off to get the hell out of the country, I'm not sure … I suppose revenge is always one's first priority in such a situation. Once she's mastered her training, she sets upon exacting her revenge on the pimps, johns, and drug dealers who forced this predicament upon her in the first place. The film is ploddingly meticulous in showing every single step of her process; this may be intended as a detached and clinical dissection (a la "CSI"), but it gets pretty tedious watching her, like, count her money, or load and re-load guns, step-by-step. Perhaps this is meant as an Anarchist's Cookbook for rape victims. The revenge scenes get really out there, enhanced to an almost hallucinatory level by the delay-drenched synth soundtrack, which is so trippy I wasn't sure I wasn't the drugged-up white slave. It ends up in completely bleak and surreal terrain, like Fellini doing Switchblade Sisters. Thriller is a clear source for Kill Bill (the color-coordinated eye-patches, for one thing, give that away), but it's a wacked-out experience all its own. It's not for everyone&mdashhell, I'm not sure it's for me, come to think of it—but I was surprised to find, amid the glutted world of cult exploitation flicks, that Thriller actually shocked me numerous times. I was dumbstruck and uncomfortable almost the whole way through … that's saying something.
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