The Loved Ones (2009)

This is what comes out if you crossbreed Jeffrey Dahmer, Carrie and the Overly Attached Girlfriend meme. It is not neccessarily a good thing.

There is Lana, Lara, Laura, Lorna or something, who asks Ben to go to the school ball with her, and learns that Ben is going with his girlfriend Holly, Molly or Hailey. This leads Lana-Lara-Laura-Lorna’s dad to kidnap Ben, play school ball at home for his daughter, and this results in the attempt to drill a hole in Ben’s head and boil his brain with hot water to make him “one of them”. “Them”, in this case, is Laura-Lorna’s mother (?), a zombie-like creature who apparently already underwent this procedure. And possibly the cannibal freaks living in the basement.

So far, so good. It’s not such a bad premise to have a deranged teenage girl creating a braindead homecoming king. However, this movie tries too hard to be smarter than such a story allows. It begins with Ben killing his father in a car crash caused by a bloodcovered boy standing on the road. This boy turns out to be the brother of the goth metal chick Ben’s chubby stoner friend takes to the actual school ball. And the son of the (seemingly only) cop searching for Ben after he fails to pick up Holly-Molly-Hailey. This subplot adds absolutely nothing to the story. Chubby Stoner and Goth Metal Chick add some awkward sex’n’drugs scenes that are irrelevant and not even neccessary to get a higher rating. The torture scenes involving Ben are perfectly enough to qualify this movie as something between mild torture porn and rape’n’revenge with a male victim.

The stupidity highlight reel shows Ben trying to escape by climbing on a freaking tree, and the kidnapper duo throwing stones at him until he falls down; the incredible coincidence of a perfectly functional flashlight just happening to be in the basement when Ben is thrown in there, and the rather random incest implications that just scream “we’re working down a list labeled CONTROVERSIAL THEMES”.

Famous Last Words: Nice try, but nothing more.

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Vile (2011)

Promising idea – some mysterious scientist kidnaps a bunch of people who have to torture each other to release a certain amount of brain liquids that are only released when experiencing extreme pain. Though this does have the more interesting angle of torture porn – unwilling torturers doing what has to be done to survive – it sadly makes some big mistakes. First, the abduction of the group of friends is ridicolous. Instant K.O. perfume? Oh come on. Second, pretty much everyone is way too easily on board with “alright, let’s just torture this guy”. Third, despite a few characters standing out for having a personality, they are ultimately mostly forgettable and I couldn’t put a name to each face most of the time. And last but not least, the plot twist and… let’s call it the attempt of a classic rape’n’revenge ending, underlined the absurdity of the brain implants premise. The unplugging and collecting of the bottles was too unrealistic – up to this point, it was possible to suspend disbelief and not question the implants too much, and the torture, injuries and consequences were believable.

All in all, it’s probably one of the better movies in this category due to little time spent with building up the doomed characters, an acceptable death toll and generally moderate, realistic gore, but still stays behind the expectations.

Famous Last Words: Nothing special.

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”.

Would You Rather? (2012)

In this movie, two of my favorite things in the horror genre come together: Jeffrey Combs and torture porn. What could go wrong? I don’t know, because “Would You Rather?” did everything right.

Iris has a brother in need of a donor organ and a lot of debt, which is why she agrees to the strange offer an associate of her doctor makes: She can participate in a “game” played on a diner party of his “foundation”, if she wins, all her problems will go away. For similar reasons – mostly, crushing debt – an illustrous group of seven other people also accepted this offer. It soon turns out the game isn’t as harmless as they thought, as the excentric millionaire enjoys making people do horrible things to themselves and other players.

Perfect premise; the tension is always better if normal people do awful things to save their skin than a deranged psychopath who does awful things just to be a deranged psychopath and “because”. The 8 victims have distinctive personalities, different strategies and ideas of survival and team spirit and the likeable ones are actually likeable. I’m not quite sure where they were trying to go with the doctor’s attempt to save Iris, or the jerk son’s existance, but those are minor issues and easily overlooked by the well-paced “game rounds”.

Famous Last Words: Excellent, not overly gory, yet delightfully unsettling torture porn – recommended.

Gag (2006)

So not the entire box of unwatched DVDs is complete trash… After the mostly painfully stupid movies of the last days, “Gag” is quite solid torture porn. Not much of a story or any substance or depth – two guys break into the very wrong house, a deranged psychopath’s torture lair – but I expected neither. The main character, Tony, doesn’t act like an idiot; the killer gets creative with awful ways to end his victims. Not much else to say, this was an enjoyable movie. No genre highlight, but far from a lowlight either.

Famous Last Words: Simple, to the point, recommended.

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.

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.

Serbia, revisited

104 minutes torture porn it’s truest form. I finally got to watch the uncut A Serbian Film, and I’m still impressed with the execution. Sure, it didn’t have the surprise effects anymore, but still. It is rare that I rewatch a movie so shortly after the first go, but it is hard to resist to check out the uncut version if the cut one was already so impressive. Actually, I can’t pinpoint from memory where those 8 minutes were missing. That’s a good thing, as it just tells me that the movie is, in either version, a round thing.

However, Vukmir’s monologue about victims and their power made me think. Is it true? Do victims have the power he claims? In A Serbian Film, Milos is both victim and victimizer, yet I feel nothing of his power. He is, in fact, powerless; a tool Vukmir and his men use, which puts him more on the victim side. But do I care about him? Do I feel sorry for what happens to him? No. I don’t. I see him as a tool. A choiceless machine that does what the puppet masters ask. No matter how he tries to escape or fight against it. What about his victims; Maria, Petar, the nameless women? Same here, means to an end. I also feel nothing about Vukmir, Rasa and the other victimizers.

And maybe that is exactly what I find so impressive: That I, the viewer, can just sit back and watch, without taking sides. No morals, no ethics, no common sense is forced on me; they are all victims in their own way, and victimizers at the same time. And the movie doesn’t tell me either side is good or bad. And also leaves me the option to still think that people who genuinely like Lady Gaga or Jedward are by far more dangerous than people making movies like this.