Poor doomed Everly is shot, stabbed, sliced by a samurai sword and attacked from every angle by a parade of hoods and whores she dispatches so easily that even a rogue cop takes one look at the mounting corpses and mutters, “That’s a lotta dead whores.” 

Alleged screenwriter Yale Hannon liked the line so much that he repeats it several times, just in case you forgot to laugh the first time. Battered, bruised and bleeding from every orifice, the star is indestructible, deploying an arsenal of weapons to dispose of her endless attackers, including a bloodthirsty Doberman attack dog named Bonzai who tries to eat her baby daughter.

At one point, she throws a hand grenade into an elevator filled with assassins just as the doors are closing. Then she meets her ultimate challenge when a monster dressed in white called “

The Sadist” shows up with a sinister medical bag similar to the one Jack the Ripper carried through the streets of Whitechapel. Mumbling in Japanese with English subtitles, he pulls out his toys—sulfuric acid, gasoline, sodium oxide—to a jaunty rendition of “Jingle Bells.” Let the tortures begin.

The movie, filmed by Joe Lynch for reasons that remain a mystery in Belgrade, Serbia, is beyond salvage but what is most unsettling is watching Salma Hayek suffer through it. 

She once played a memorable Frida Kahlo in the great art film Frida, and it’s sobering to see her sink so low. Worse still, so much of the torture takes place while her daughter looks on, clutching a teddy bear. I gave up when 

The Sadist poured a bottle of acid down her mother’s throat, but opened my eyes again as the camera panned across five floors of dead bodies while the sound track played “Silent Night.” I read one review that raved about her cheetah-print high heels. This is what we’ve come to.