THE WEEKEND

Sadistic fantasy by a first novelist from Brighton, England, where it takes place. This is the weekend that Bella, a prostitute who's gone straight, gets even. She's finally had it with her creepy peeping-Tom neighbor with his filthy, abusive phone calls. So Bella puts on a ski mask, takes a hammer, sneaks into the guy's apartment, and beats his skull to a pulp. Lord, it feels good! Next she goes off to a gun shop, later buys an automatic from a black-market dealer. When a psychology lecturer invites her up to his room, then fails to penetrate her during sex and asks to be tied up instead, she follows orders, ties him to a chair, then gives him a shower cap over the head that turns his face purple underneath before he dies. Then her dentist tapes her wrists to his steering wheel and rams himself down her throat, so when she's free and he's peeing against a wall, she runs him over several times with his own car. Next she comes across three young toughs about to set a woman derelict on fire and blows all three away, in separate, extendedly delicious acts, with her new automatic. Lastly, she is being strangled and raped under a pier and does away with her murderer with a Persian flick knife, puncturing and slicing him until she's happily assured that vengeance is complete. She's not captured. She's out there now, looking for rapists. . . . This is a kind of Olympia Press version of Death Wish, with each completely unbelievable murder served up as a five-course slaughter with blood and groans for dessert. As writing, beneath contempt. Movie rights bought by Death Wish director Michael Winner.