Experiment in Torture (2007)

Christ on a bike, what a shitty movie. 80 full minutes with airheads: uninspired kills, inconsistant “story”telling with no logic or structure, acting on soap opera level, shaky camera to obscure the underwhelming effects, a pseudo-BDSM theme and painfully stupid cardboard cutout cliché characters.

Maybe I can’t appreciate dumb chicks in bikinis enough, maybe I lack of the ability (or desire) to even attempt to keep 5 near identical looking strippers apart, maybe I’m just jaded. But I simply can’t see any redeeming qualities in a movie where absolutely no-one notices that one of the various killers wears a handsome-human rubbermask over his Freddy Kruger pizza face; people apparently change their names at will, everyone has a surprise sibling and the attempt to make sense of it all in a wooden epilogue police report fails horribly by adding more “background” to random, previously unimportant “characters” than the first 76 minutes.

So, umm. Story. 6 strippers get hired to do a fetish movie in a house by a lake. Some dude is there as a host. There is some violence; some pseudo-reasons (“mutilation as artform”), much confusion who is who and why they are there and how they know each other; various other guys and possibly two or three previously never mentioned women and everyone is somehow the killer, related to the killer or the victims, of which most – disappointingly – survive. After all that, a failed “edgy” final scene of a girl going insane. Or whatever.

Famous Last Words: Someone misunderstood “torture porn” – it’s supposed to be a genre that treats violence like a porn film treats sex; exploitative, sensationalist, unapologetic and uncensored. It is NOT supposed to be a genre that has strippers, a lame fetish theme and is a pain to watch. And that’s exactly what “Experiment in Torture” is – could as well be titled “Experiment in Viewer Patience”.

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House of Wax (2005)

Hard to believe how boring a movie about plastinating people alive can be. Well, “plastinating” with wax, but you get the idea. The group of twenty-somethings is flat and mostly not even twodimensional, and you spend much more than 20 minutes with these jerks before anything at all happens. It sure doesn’t help that one of them is “played” by Paris Hilton and if you think “well, at least I can look foreward to her death”, you will be disappointed. She dies, but it takes a long time and isn’t too spectacular either. The level of stupidity in the first 2/3rds of the movie is around “not stupid enough to facepalm or care”, but it gets massively cranked up toward the end.

Have you ever found it stupid if screaming victims run up the stairs to escape the killer? Yes? Well, try running up the stairs in a house entirely made of wax that is on fire.

Famous Last Words: What a waste of time.

Carver (2008)

Wow, what a lesson how a single scene can ruin a movie.

But let’s begin with the… well, story? I’m not sure there really is one that goes beyond the typical slasher formula of “group of twenty-somethings camps in the woods, killed by rednecks”. Actually, that is exactly the story here, with the not exactly uncommon addition “killed by rednecks who make snuff movies”.

The group of twenty-somethings consists of Pete, his younger brother Brian, their friends Zack and Gina (or something) and another camper they meet, Kate. They are semi-forgettable, but at least not as annoying as the usual cast of “20 minutes with jerks”. That is the next point that stands out as positive: There is no “20 minutes with jerks” phase in the movie and the pacing in general is great. Stuff keeps happening from the first minute; there are no lengths. My usual attention span lasts 15 minutes of nothing relevant happening into a movie; this one wasn’t hard to sit through at all. I also liked the overall atmosphere; very grindhouse, not too overdone-gritty, nice light.

Now to the less positive points. This movie was clearly going for torture porn, and measured by Hostel standards, it did succeed. My opinion about Hostel, however, is that it is obscenely overrated, highly disappointing and boring. “Carver” has more kills, more gore, more explicit gore, using a variety of tools (mainly farming tools). Yet these scenes still seem uninspired and don’t follow through on the ideas. In some cases, the victims underact the injury and hardly scream or struggle; in general, everyone recovers much too fast and too unphased from hammer blows and later even shotguns. “The Hills Run Red” comes to mind; a very similar issue in a very similar movie – a masked maniac killing people in the woods to make snuff movies.

In total, this was alright to watch – with the exception of the one scene to ruin it all and make it laughable. An escaped victim sees a chance to run over the killer with a truck and actually takes it, then even double taps with a fork into the head. At this point, yeah, the killer is dead. Until he steps up behind her and seriously says “that was my stunt double”. Really? REALLY? Come on. That was completely unneccessary, and comical in a clearly not intended way. You can’t make a serious slasher/torture porn and then bring such a stupid “plot twist”. A second killer, sure, that was the idea all along, but a STUNT DOUBLE of a rather recognizable guy? Had the actual second killer taken over at this point, I would not see any problem with this movie as a whole and would rate it as one of the more enjoyable slashers. But this scene ruined it all.

Famous Last Words: Just… WHY?

Bloodletting The Death Factory (2008)

This movie has several interesting things going on; a real concept or script obviously not among them. According to IMDB, this movie is about a guy who invites internet pervs to a snuff show, but then kills them instead of the innocent victim. Sounds good to me, but that’s not the actual story of the movie. Said guy is not a Jigsaw style vigilante; he’s a religious zealot killing in the name of god (or something) with the help of his idiot brother Sid and his failed science experiment mutant sister Alexa (a crossover of 5th Element costume leftovers, X-23/Lady Deathstrike and drug abuse). And his snuff website “Gorehouse” is also not a fake to bait pervs, it’s a very real trading place for them.

The pervs who came to see the snuff are also not all pervs. Actually, the main character, “Massive 9”, is the heroine of the movie; a grieving mother who lost her daughter to one of the real pervs – a pedo guy called “Rubber Love” who attends a snuff event for undisclosed reasons. “Massive 9” went undercover to find her daughter’s killer and this thirst for revenge obviously clouded her judgement as she happily traded other snuff movies to get credibility for her identity.

Early in the movie, there’s an element I really like: the introduction of characters via reality show style screens with their names, aliases and likes/dislikes. It’s easily the most entertaining part of the entire movie. “White Manson”, a nazi rapist and “Black Johnson”, a slave trader, stick around for a bit. The rest is more or less decoration – man-hating call girl “Slutty Baby” is there to engage in a pointless lesbian scene with clichee goth domina “Gretel” while clichee goth slave “Hansel” gets slaughtered by Alexa somewhere else; same for anarchist wannabe bomb terrorist “Cockmaster”.

This somewhat entertaining part of the movie abruptly ends when “Massive 9” kills “Rubber Love” early on. After that, the script got lost and what we get are various people dying by the hands of mutant Alexa while trying to escape the warehouse they are in. Somewhere down the road, “White Manson”, the neonazi with the most pitiful tiny swastika tattoo in movie history, admits that “Rubber Love” only bought the snuff tape of “Massive 9″s daughter and he made it. Meanwhile, the zealot guy running the show lost control over his idiot brother; then there’s some confusion if Alexa got killed or not, then “Massive 9” gets injected with… I don’t know, the stuff that made Alexa a rabid cannibal mutant and consequently turns into a rabid cannibal mutant, too. Then she kills everyone else except the idiot brother. Then, seriously a minute before the credits roll, a group named “The Boys” appears at the warehouse and shoots everyone. The end.

The idea is really nice, it sounded like a mix of Sadisticum and Saw. I think without the weirdo mutant sister, this movie would have been a lot better. Well, a script wouldn’t have hurt either. As it is, it’s somewhere between faux documentary, random jumps, pointless characters and trying too hard to create a “cult monster” (Alexa) while neglecting the fact that a claw-wielding female killer already exists in the form of Lady Deathstrike.

Turistas (2006)

I don’t know why I even bothered to watch the entire thing. It was probably something about missing cannibal movies and taking the next best slasher involving a jungle. Anyway, now that I managed to get through this movie, I can as well write about it.

So, it’s a “torture porn” (according to some IMDB lists) about a group of gringos going on vacation to Brazil and getting butchered. It’s also one big excuse to have the entire cast walk around in swimwear for most of the movie. Maybe they should have made a movie about, I don’t know, surfing instead, because the actual butchering and horror elements are limited to the absolute minimum.

There’s Alex, a guy who looks like I imagine Enrique Iglesias, and his sister and her best friend; two English guys/brothers of which one is called Finn and the other looks like the love child of Ashton Kutcher and Ian Somerhalder and an Australian girl who speaks Portugese. They are all on a bus through some Brazilian rain forest to a hotel, but alas, the bus has an accident and they are stranded. They then discover a beach bar and party all night, and meet a Swedish couple that is briefly introduced and killed in an unspectacular way shortly after. The gringos all wake up on the beach and realize they were mugged. There’s also a local guy, Kiko, who seems to be the one to lure the gringos to a remote house somewhere in the forest. (“Seems” because he switches sides and it’s not entirely unexpected.)

So far, so classic. It’s like any other slasher, except it’s not a forest in North America this time. Other than that, it’s every other slasher ever – a 50/50 male/female group, the local who works for the bad guys and pretends to be their friend, no cell signal, mugged and stranded in a remote place. The first problem this movie has is one it shares with a number of other slashers, too: Instead of 20 minutes with jerks, we have to spend almost an hour with this group of plain boring folks until something happens. None of them is even annoying or stereotypical. They are all really just boring. That’s somehow good, somehow bad.

After a damn hour of running through the forest and swimming in a waterfall/lake/cave, they arrive at the house in the rain forest and again, not much of note happens. Then the bad guys arrive at night. The bad guys, in this case, are a certain Zamora and his men. Zamora is not, as the name suggests, Tim Cridland and he is also by far less the Torture King than Tim Cridland. No, this Zamora is a Brazilian organ harvester who intends to steal the gringo kidneys and livers to save Brazilian lives. How patriotic of him.

This premise is also the introduction of the movie’s next problem. You see, torture porn and slashers live from graphic violence and it’s pretty hard to have that and not damage the organs. Which is why Turistas’ only gory scene is a surgery scene and it ranks very low on the “Eww” scale at that. After this scene, the gringos escape; minus “sister’s best friend”, who was the victim. From here on, the movie plays entirely in the very dark, so I’m not sure how the English guys die. But since only Kiko, Alex, Alex’ Sister and Australian Girl make it out of the house, I assume they were shot at some point by Zamora’s henchmen.

Now, things still take place in the dark, but even darker: The last 15 – 20 minutes take place in dark underwater caves. Kiko gets shot by a henchman, too. The others somehow manage to kill one attacking bad guy and talk the other one into killing Zamora and letting them go. Well, yeah, and that’s the end of it; Alex and Alex’ Sister flying home. No idea where Aussie Girl went, but she was last seen alive.

Noteworthy: The dialogue. 50 % consists of the lines “Come on then” and “Let’s go”; another 30 % are in Portugese with only two scenes subtitled. That can’t carry a story very far, to be frank. Maybe it all makes more sense if you speak Portugese, but I doubt. What a waste of time.

Took a wrong turn

I have no idea how I made it through the 93 minutes aka eternity that Wrong Turn 4 is. It is a bad movie, and I really hate to say that, considering that Wrong Turn 2 is one of my all time faves and the 2 others aren’t that bad either. Why does 4 suck so much? There are several reasons.

1. I didn’t think it was possible to take 20 minutes with jerks to a new level after Hostel, but it sadly is. Wrong Turn 4 ups the number of jerks present and takes it to a new extreme – 20 minutes with jerks is also called “developing doomed characters” for a reason. The laughable character development this group of… 8? 10? No idea, lots… gets is plain horrible, establishing group dynamics by one-liners (!) and leaving no stereotype out, down to the personal union of token black AND lesbian AND action girl. Actually, I was thankful for that character because I couldn’t keep the white kids apart, as usual. It gets worse once the blond chick is dead and then all the guys die. It’s 4 girls with straight dark hair. Who thought THAT was a good idea? Couldn’t they find a redhead or an asian or someone – ANYONE – not looking like a clone?

2. Saving the best for last was yesterday; today, we fill the 5 minutes BEFORE THE OPENING CREDITS with the best part of the movie. That’s the cannibal trio as kids, locked in a sanatorium, then escaping. Well, that is the best part if you can overlook the incredibly silly stereotype: Every mental hospital’s high security ward has exactly ONE guy watching it, and if he’s dead, the criminally insane (insane enough to only GRUNT and have no way to communicate) can easily take over the entire facility. Because there are no other guards ANYWHERE in the building.

3. So, this movie is somewhere between a slasher and monster horror, I guess. Why bring in the “abandoned hospital ghost movie” chlichee too? Because a simple slasher with monstrous creatures isn’t badass enough? Well, it worked out perfectly fine in 3 previous movies. Fuck that crossover mania.

4. I watch gory movies because, you know, I like… GORE. Until now, Wrong Turn has delivered exactly that. Now, I asked myself after 40 minutes when the hell they’ll even start hunting down the victims. I mean, really, 2 pointless lesbian scenes and another pointless sex scene are more than enough to endure to demand a little of the movie’s actual premise, especially if you also take a prolongued ski trip scene into account. ITS BORING LIKE HELL. Then the gore finally gets going… well, or not. Rarely have I seen so uninspired, boring kills. The one scene worth to mention, eaten alive fondue (Hostel 2 says hi, by the way), stretches like bubblegum under the shoe on a hot day, losing its initial appeal completely. The rest is dumb and repeatative (like 2 pulling bodyparts off with barbed wire scenes, lots of bored/boring stabbing with small knives, and an overly stereotype yet incredibly pointless and ineffective chainsaw scene, or pointless running around with industrial size drills that shouldn’t even work in an abandoned hospital, lacking a power source… or 200 miles long cables).

5. Subtitle ad absurdum. Wrong Turn 4 – Bloody Beginnings. That implies a prequel-ish quality to me – how did the cannibal clan start out? Everything looks right when there are, in fact, 3 cannibal KIDS in a 70ies-like setting. But then, we are suddenly “20 years later”, they are grown up, for some reason still live in the sanatorium (which is a HUGE VICTORIAN BUILDING IN THE SNOWY MOUNTAINS OF WEST VIRGINIA) and – yep, no backstory at all. Not what happened to the other inmates/patients after they were freed from their cells. Not if an investigation took place (hospital looks EXACTLY like before, down to a HAIRPIN still being in the same place), not who the parents were, not if there were more clan members. At one point – after all male victims are dead – I began to consider that this was maybe the beginning and the 3 cannibal guys would capture one or some of the girls to start their clan. It’s hard to inbreed with 3 guys, after all, so they needed women from elsewhere. But no. This slight hope for logic went to hell when they had the chance to capture one alive, and instead used a HUGE INDUSTRIAL DRILL to kill her (in an otherwise unspectacular manner). And the rest, too.

6. The acting is plain horrible. This is excused and even appreciated in any amateur and b-trash splatter, but not in a polished Hollywood production that had it’s peek of glory with Henry Rollins in part 2. Sorry, but if you pull out the large ham, you better follow up on it. Not that I expected any big name actors, but at least I expected ACTORS at all.

7. The dialogues are worse than in most b-movies, way worse. The characters act with no logic and are not conistant with ANYTHING. The entire script is an appeal for stricter drug controls because you really need to be on something to find any sense in that.

Famous last words: Wrong Turn did indeed take a wrong turn with that crap.

Newsflash: Hostel 4 doesn’t suck…much!

Surprise of the day: Hostel III doesn’t suck too much. Ironically, it was a direct to DVD release, “based upon characters by Eli Roth”, but neither written nor directed by him. There are twists I didn’t expect, and though I don’t exactly expect ANYTHING from Hostel (except that it will suck), I can appreciate that. Ok, I gotta admit, towards the end, there are TOO many twists and it goes a bit in a “everyone double-crosses everyone else” direction. When you begin to expect a surprising twist every 10 minutes, it kinda kills the surprise. However, I have to give credit to the Ukrainian victim: It’s the first time in the history of Hostel that a character does something remotely intelligent. It is debatable HOW intelligent it really is to run into a room labeled with “HIGH VOLTAGE” with an axe, but he did achieve his goal to disable the electricity, without dying. (Well, dying from THAT.)

Also remarkable: The victims (there are 8 in total, face-heel/heel-face turns not considered) are not as faceless and boring as in Hostel 1 & 2. Sure the character development doesn’t break any records, but it goes far enough to like or dislike them at least a bit. That is a notable contrast to Hostel 1 & 2, where you either hated them all from the moment you saw them, or gave a shit about them from their first scene to their last dying breathe.

Especially in the first 30 minutes, there is a lot actual suspense; very uncharacteristic for Hostel. I more expected the usual approach: 20 minutes (well, 45 minutes) with Jerks trope, followed by major disappointment and boredom. That is not the case here, there aren’t any real lengths. I credit the non-sucking quality of this movie to the uninvolvement of Eli Roth – I always thought the premise is great and wished someone else would come along and do it better.

Short Cuts, 2nd Take

I haven’t been too busy with movies in the last week. I had to catch up on reality shows, with the sad result: all my suspicions were confirmed. It’s really just the German version that always sucks bad, and it’s our very own fault that we will never find a real idol, talent or top model. Our winners will stay exactly that: audition show winners, regardless of their quality.

The better result of a comparison is that Europe is stronger than ever when it comes to horror movies. While the US is busy to “re-interpret” successful Asian movies, come up with more pointless sequels of movies that are far beyond their highlights or to re-make classics/commit brutal blasphemy, Europe pays no attention to this trend and has found a silent agreement to go in a different direction.

[Rec] and High Tension are no longer exceptions from the prejudice that European movies aren’t daring enough or too artsy to shock.

Martyrs is great, as to be expected. I’m at a point where I’m more surprised if a French movie sucks than if it doesn’t. Martyrs is artsy, no doubt, but it is also extremly sick and graphic, right from the start. A girl, Lucie, escapes a torture chamber, grows up in a mental hospital, only talks to her best friend – Anna, another girl who was abused by her stepfather. After 15 years of silence, Lucie returns to the family that kept her like a dog in a dark chamber – with a shotgun. I call this the ‘first act’ – Lucie kills the family, even though they seem to have changed and live a normal life with their children now, while Anna, the more stable one, loves Lucie too much to give up on her. In the end of act one, Lucie commits suicide; she still sees a hallucination of a girl she left behind on her escape; an illusion that punishes her for that and finally drives her to cut her own throat.

Act two is actually the one losing some of the tension – surprisingly, because this is the actual torture porn part. A group of people, dressed in black and acting like a militia, rush into the house and take Anna prisoner. She had discovered a secret door to an underground facility, and found the girl Lucie saw in her halluciantions. Attempting to help her, she undersetimated how disturbed someone would be after over 15 years of torture. Well, she will discover it soon enough, as Anna takes her place in the dark chamber now.

Act three, or more the revelation act, finally reveals the intentions of the mystery militia. The group is dedicated to create Martyrs, unrelated to religion, by inflicting pain and suffering, in order to reach a state of ecstasy that allows the ‘Martyr’ to see ‘the other side’. Why exactly they do it? It’s not mentioned, but it also doesn’t matter. Martyrs manages it to stay interesting, even through the quiet parts of plain torture, lacking of any dialogue or explanation, and to come up with a satisfying end.

A Serbian Film is a revelation of it’s own. Someone actually got the concept of torture porn and brought it to a new level. Milos, a retired porn star in need of money, accepts the offer of the shady artist Vukmir to appear in his new movie. He soon starts to doubt the project, but tries to go through with it while his brother Marko, a policeman, investigates Vukmir.

The movie is like a 96 minutes drug trip through the eyes of Milos, and though it uses many elements I’m usually not too fond of, I would call it a perfect execution. We have a not always chronological storytelling, but it fits the blackout moments of Milos, the time steps and backflashes when the memories are triggered. We have some cases of handcamera, but again, this just underlines the unstable drugged scenes. The ‘artsy’ scenes shot by the strange cameramen sometimes remind of the glass box scenes in Tromeo and Juliet, just a lot rawer and sicker.

In movies that intentionally go for the most extreme perversions, it can easily come out forced, constructed and stay behind expectations. We’ve seen that in movies like Hostel, Wolf Creek, Hills Run Red or the Hills Have Eyes remakes. A Serbian Film, however, fulfills these expectations and presents them in such a raw and dirty way that it feels authentic and disturbing from the first moment to the last – and can still surprise through it all.

Session 9 as the only US production I watched last week, is certainly not a bad movie, but – sorry to say – pales in comparison to the outstanding European ones. It is by far more mystery than horror, but though there are a few graphic scenes (maybe 5 minutes and not going to any extremes) it creates a wonderful atmosphere of permanent danger. Sure, there are some parts of the plot that don’t make much sense and also don’t really reveal their meaning or relevance, but overall, the spooky scenery of an abandoned mental hospital makes up for it. It’s a nice watch, though I can see how it never made the big break.

Short Cuts

Digging through movies I haven’t seen in ages/at all, I came across these in the 2nd January week.

Blood Feast II – All U can eat

The thing that bothers me most about this classic is the title. “all U can eat”. That’s l33t speak before it was trendy. But luckily, the title is really the only thing I dislike. The story is incredibly funny and gory, and though the FX can’t completely keep up with more recent movies, it is still way better than most so-called gore flicks of the past 10 years.

Bloodsucking Freaks

An all-time fave that combines so many of my fave grindhouse elements – caged women, slave trade, sideshow flair and sick torture, along with an almost stand up comic lead duo. What I don’t really get is why this movie is said to be so politically incorrect. The dwarf, for example, is not shown as a mindless idiot who obeys whatever his master Sardu says. No, he’s almost an equal partner – almost because Sardu is the director and Ralphus an actor. But still, he gets his share of fun and artistic freedom, and frequently enjoys the same luxury as his boss. Also, the caged women are almost all white, while Sardu’s dominatrix and her aide are black – that’s very open-minded for a gore flick and completely reverses the ‘token minority dies first’ trope. This movie has been a fave from the first time I’ve seen it, and it will always be.

Wrong Turn I & II

Oh man, how could I ignore them so long? Answer: I got them along with Vacancy I and II and High Tension. I found all of these boring and uninspired, so I didn’t bother to watch Wrong Turn – and then forgot. Now I gave them a chance and they immediately made it into my top list. While Wrong Turn (1) was nice and bloody and didn’t have any lengths, Wrong Turn 2 – Dead End is even better. Not just bloodier, though that certainly applies. I also just love the premise of a reality survival game show turning into the real deal. Bonus points for Henry Rollins as retired marine Dale, who is so badass, he’d technically need an identical twin brother to contain it.

Dead Snow

…made me regret yet again that I never learned any Scandinavian language, because the DVD only features the original Norwegian sound and German, both also as subs. Not really helpful. As much as I love the movie, as much am I bothered by German synchros. I would have watched it in Norwegian with English subs, if there were any. German translations always seem to lack authenticity – the voices seem wrong even if I don’t know the real actors’ voices. Still, a great movie that will always have a special place in my heart. Nazi zombies are simply better than just nazis or just zombies.

Saw II

Easily my fave of the series. Not that hard, as I only consider Saw 1 – 3 as decent and the rest as crap I only watch to rant about it. Mainly watched it because I needed to relax, voice-wise, and it was the nearest DVD I knew had English audio.

Anatomy

After (yet another) failed attempt to watch Salo – The 120 Days of Sodom, I decided to make the test: a German movie in original language. And yes, my theory confirms; the voices sound right, only synchros suck bad. To my surprise, the movie didn’t suck. I hadn’t bothered with it before because I don’t like Franka Potente, which is a reason I dislike a lot German movies. It’s sad but true – we don’t have that many decent actors. One of them was in Anatomy, by the way, Benno Fürmann.

The movie has a few lengths in the middle, but that’s not too bad. It’s actually quite entertaining and features some awesome grotesque plastinated bodies. I hadn’t expected the surgery scenes to be so explicit; kudos.

Salo – The 120 Days of Sodom

Well, I just don’t get it. It’s one of these ‘must sees’, but I can’t get through the full length. Why the hell is this movie so controversial? Why do people claim it is perverse and shocking? It’s goddamn boring! I make 1 hour at best, and then I get distracted by the first fly on the window, hunger, urgent desire to play a video game… anything, if it’s only more entertaining than this. I keep trying, just so I can say I’ve seen it, but I have a feeling I make it through the 235 minutes cut of Caligola before I ever see the rest of Salo.

The Senseless Dwarf

Umm, ‘The Sinful Dwarf’, I mean. I know it’s a sexploitation classic, but even more, it is a picture perfect example how bad a movie can really be.

It’s not boring. It’s painfully predictable. It’s not just a bad story, it’s even more the bad execution. And more than this, it’s the misconception beginning with the title. This is not a movie about a dwarf. It is a movie that also has a dwarf in it. But the exceptional performance and lead character is his mother.

The story. Absurd, naturally. We have the dwarf Olaf or Oleg or something. He lives with his mother, a former cabaret star still clinging to her past glory. They live in a big house with a small room they rent to young couples; and they have an attic with drugged, naked women to rent to strangers for sex. And they have a drug dealer who also runs a toy store and hides the drugs in stuffed animals. Obviously, the plot is that a young couple moves in the house, the dwarf and the mother want to add the woman to their collection of slaves, but her husband (who gets a job with the toy store drug dealer) finds out and saves her.

So far so good. But the only thing the dwarf really does is leading men to the attic and locking the door for them. Sometimes, he also plays with toy trains. That hardly qualifies as lead character, as the mother is the one plotting and planning all the time. Plus performing on her own cabaret stage and dealing drugs. I realize a movie called “The evil old lady with the dwarf son” would not be as appealing from the title, but it would get the point.

Famous last words: Rent this movie. Don’t buy it. You’d regret.