Baise-Moi (2001)

SEXUAL PREDATOR Bach prowls the night in ''Baise-Moi''

In Baise-Moi, which provoked a scandal in its native France (the title translates as ''F--- me''), a rape, depicted with ugly explicitness, spurs the victim, Manu (Raffaela Anderson), and her prostitute friend, Nadine (Karen Bach), into a barbed wire road odyssey of sexual rage. The movie, which plays like ''Thelma & Louise'' as scripted by Lorena Bobbitt, merges graphic sex and graphic gore into a violent howl of desire and disgust. The two women pick up a series of men (and women, too), whom they proceed to screw, humiliate, and murder in increasingly operatic ways.

They're like dominatrices who've unleashed their volcanic ids; codirector Virginie Despentes, adapting her novel, seems to have found a new primal scene in the moment when Manu regurgitates all over the nice guy she's fellating. Few would mistake ''Baise-Moi'' for a good movie, yet it's not dismissible, either. It's a caterwauling punk anthem on film, a vengeful fantasia served up with digital rawness. The hellbent antiheroines are as horny as they are hateful, and it's that fatal split, rooted in biology as well as feminist anger, that makes the sensationalism stick.