Giorgio Serafini

(On Cable TV, July 2020) An ugly movie both in content and in presentation, The Executioners scratches the bottom of the barrel when it comes to inspiration: four women in an isolated house, three men invading the house, sexual assault, rape and vengeance. If you think you’ve seen this before, it’s because you have—this specific plot has been in use for decades now. Not that writer-director Giorgio Serafini does much with it: his work is amateurish and thus complements the terrible acting from the entire cast. While the film would like you to believe it has a few twists in store, that’s not really true nor does it raise the level of the film: the idea of victims taking revenge on their aggressors is not a twist, and the film’s preposterous closing moments make a mockery of everything else. (Serafini’s idea of “foreshadowing” is having a character call out the ending in the first ten minutes.) None of it makes a difference given the drawn-out middle section in which the female characters are put through a horrifying ordeal—this is a male-gaze exploitation film and none of it is redeemed through execution. The low-budget visual polish of the film is unconvincing, and the staging doesn’t make sense either. I’m not sure there’s anything worth salvaging from The Executioners—even the “clever” ending fails in roughly five different ways the more you think about it. There’s an evergreen audience for exploitation films, but even they are likely to be disappointed by this one.