Female Slaves Revenge (AKA Apartheid Slave Women’s Justice) (1997)

Female Slaves Revenge is one of those stunningly terrible movies that you almost admire for its steadfast disregard for entertainment value, technical competency, aesthetic beauty, artistic merit, common sense and good taste. Most striking, though, is the fact that, while the plot is ostensibly a topical (albeit exploitive) exploration of racial tensions in post-colonial Africa, it turns out to be little more than a cheap fetish film.

The fetish of choice? Something called “trampling.” I can’t say that I’m familiar with it, but it seems to involve a shirtless man being stepped on by women in high heels. Writer/director Ted V. Mikels (renowned for cult films like The Astro-Zombies and The Corpse Grinders) seems to be quite the fan, as he’s written himself a starring role as a wicked landowner destined to be punished…underfoot.

“This movie you are about to see is about man’s inhumanity to man,” he explains in the first of the film’s overly expository preambles, but it becomes clear that it’s more about one man’s foot obsession. Mikels, who resembles a cross between Santa Claus and Salvador Dali, plays an unnamed landowner in an unnamed African country whose ruling white minority has just been overthrown. While all of the white folk flee and abandon their property to the blacks, this landowner stubbornly refuses. As a result, his servants — all female, all wearing spiked heels — rise up and take him prisoner (conveniently ripping off his shirt in the process).

The women try the old man in an informal court with the head servant in the home, Wateesah (Jennifer Dove), serving as judge and the other nine ladies acting as both the jury and as the witnesses against the landowner — not the most fundamentally sound judicial system, if you ask me. Thus begins THE TRIAL, which accounts for about two-thirds of Female Slaves Revenge. That’s right, more than 50 minutes of this film takes place in the same small room with the same people doing the same things over and over with the same static camera (or rather, camcorder) that only occasionally zooms in and out like the home video of an elementary school dance recital.

The movie basically plays out like this: witness testimony, kicking and stomping, witness testimony, kicking and stomping, repeat ad infinitum. It’s nowhere near as entertainingly campy nor as brutal as the DVD cover promises. It’s more like watching a city council meeting punctuated by occasional trampling breaks. Mostly, though, we’re subjected to an eternity of stiffly worded, overly explanatory, SCREAMED monologues that have the conversational flow of a washing machine instruction manual:

“You taking your ill-gained wealth and possessions from among us was more than we could bear. Consequently, it became necessary for us to take the law into our own hands. Since there is no law presently functioning in this land, this court has been assembled to take you to trial and try you for what you have done.”

Surely Apartheid wasn’t as painful as listening to these people.

Crazy-eyebrowed Butra (Rachel Powell), the jury spokesperson, announces that the old man is to stand trial lying on his back with the heels of Wateesah’s shoes pressed into his stomach. It’s put forth as a symbolic gesture of retribution for his stomping on his black servants’ rights, but really, Mikels is just getting his jollies from it all. He even lets out some guttural moans. Gross. In one of the more retch-worthy moments, he’s “forced” (yeah, right) to lick one of the women’s feet.

Of course, in the end, the white landowner is found guilty, but first we have to go through the drawn-out ballot process, first showing the women writing down their votes, then having them collect the ballots and finally reading them aloud. Having read the guilty verdict, Wateesah announces that there are four options for the man’s death:

  1. Kneel and be shot
  2. Hanging
  3. Stabbing
  4. Trampling

GEE, I WONDER WHICH ONE THEY CHOOSE… Again, though, we have to go through all 10 votes being written, gathered and read aloud. His eventual execution is like watching people kneading a mound of dough with fireplace pokers, his pale rolls of flesh flowing like an amusement park wave pool. The final scene shows the women tossing their shoes on his limp (or not-so-limp, if you know what I mean) body, burying Mikels in his stinky fetish.

Any potential for camp value that Female Slaves Revenge possesses dies around the 20-minute mark when you realize that there’s another hour coming of the same exact stuff. This movie is the worst possible combination of liberal white guilt and interracial, sadomasochistic fetishism. The diminutive Mikels just wants to get his rocks off surrounded by black Amazonian women in high heels, ready to stomp on his shriveled junk. He’d say otherwise, but I’m sure FSR was just his effort to create something he could maniacally fap to.

A scene from the horror movie Female Slaves Revenge (AKA Apartheid Slave Women's Justice)
Africa was not burned in the making of this film.
A scene from the horror movie Female Slaves Revenge (AKA Apartheid Slave Women's Justice)
Kraven the Cuckold.
A scene from the horror movie Female Slaves Revenge (AKA Apartheid Slave Women's Justice)
The Braxtons forced Satan to give Tamar a career.
A scene from the horror movie Female Slaves Revenge (AKA Apartheid Slave Women's Justice)
You have to get “jumped in” to join the Black Rockettes.
A scene from the horror movie Female Slaves Revenge (AKA Apartheid Slave Women's Justice)
At long last, Burl Ives could be viewed in captivity.
A scene from the horror movie Female Slaves Revenge (AKA Apartheid Slave Women's Justice)
Meanwhile, off camera…
A scene from the horror movie Female Slaves Revenge (AKA Apartheid Slave Women's Justice)
Robin Williams’ American Beauty screen test.
A scene from the horror movie Female Slaves Revenge (AKA Apartheid Slave Women's Justice)
Nobody throws shade like Beyonce.
A scene from the horror movie Female Slaves Revenge (AKA Apartheid Slave Women's Justice)
Somebody’s going to Hell for this.

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