Director: Taylor Sheridan
Starring: Eric Jay Beck, April Matson
There - now I don’t have to bitch about any of that in the rest of the review, as it is becoming passe to even talk about with every single piece of shit film that does these things. Instead now we can have a funnier review.
We start off this brilliant masterpiece with a tramp stamp of the movie company’s logo above some woman’s ass, which is an incredibly befitting way to start the whole thing off as I’m sure most of this movie came from someone’s ass. Also, what, the production company is Vile Entertainment, Inc.? Is this movie so worthless that it couldn’t find anywhere else to distribute itself but starting a whole new company under its own name?
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| I haven't seen a logo for a production company this good since the last Metallica album cover looked like the inside of a shit-covered toilet bowl. |
If that wasn’t confusing enough on its own, we then get a Gandhi quote about how science is just hurting people with no remorse. Because Gandhi quotes totally fit with asinine torture porn horror movies!
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| Or not. Fucking seriously? Are you just on a mission to make sure NOTHING in this movie makes sense with anything else? |
Then we get a three-minute scene of a guy we don’t know being tortured by someone else we don’t know. I’ll spoil all the dialogue of this scene for you: “Mmph! Mmmmpfh! MMMMPPPPFFFHHH!”
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| Get that tennis ball out of his mouth, I can't hear what he's saying! |
Oh boy, am I ever sold on this movie now! A scene with nothing going on but torture is the best way to open up a film! I’m excited to see the rest now.
We then get a bunch of morons sleeping in a field camping or something - either that, or they just got lost and their short attention spans led them to start a new life out there. We find out that one of the girls, Tayler, is pregnant and hasn’t told her boyfriend yet. She goes and attempts to tell him and instead they have a conversation about how running around in a forest sounds sexy. Dammit, are you gonna force me to make ANOTHER Blair Witch joke?! I can’t escape it!
We also get this gem from the other girl: “You’re pregnant, it’s not cancer. He’ll be overjoyed.” Oh, really? Pregnancy and cancer aren’t the same thing? Is that how it works now? Please bestow upon us more of your erudite gems of eternal fucking wisdom.
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| "Did you also know that donating to the Red Cross is NOT the same thing as enslaving hundreds of Jews in concentration camps?" |
Later, at a gas station, boyfriend Nick lets some older woman hitch a ride with them to her car, which she claims has run out of gas. Tayler gets extremely jealous for no reason and starts bitching Nick out for it - like he really had any incentive to do anything with the woman or even showed signs of being interested in her. Oh, wait, he didn’t. This is just shitty writing. Can’t make any interesting characters? Just have ‘em be jealous and bitchy at one another for no reason, all the time! Bam, instant drama!
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| "Allow me to be suspicious of you for no reason. WE HAVE A GOOD RELATIONSHIP!" |
So in a surprising twist, the lady they picked up is actually kidnapping them to go be tortured and stuff! Wow! If I hadn’t seen any horror movies in the last 40 years, maybe I’d actually be surprised by that! I do have to laugh at the way she does it though - she says she wants to give them a sample of perfume, then comes back wearing a gas mask and sprays gas into the car. That’s pretty fucking stupid. But funny as well, I admit.
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| Those car-to-car perfume saleswomen are just getting pushier and pushier. |
They wake up in some old house that looks more like the filmmakers just asked one of their grandmas to use their house because they had no fucking money to get a better location. They meet another group of people who I am pretty sure got lost while filming an entirely separate torture porn shit film. It’s happening; they’re all converging into one giant interchangeable mass! Run for your lives!
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| "We got lost from the cast of Hostel 4: Beating the Dead Horse with Another Dead Horse. Can you help us find our way home?" Also we never learn anything about these characters; not where they're from or how they know each other or anything. Then again, this would have just made the movie longer, so...go ahead and just have them be two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. |
They all notice something weird - apparently they all have wires hooked into their brains. Apparently they also find this videotape of a woman telling them the backstory of the film exposition-dump style: they need to cause pain to one another to make some chemical come out of the wires and into this other meter, for some science experiment some random, unidentified group is doing.
Uh, pretty fucking sure there are other ways to do this besides kidnapping people to torture them. You couldn’t find any other way to achieve the result you wanted except to kidnap like 10 people and put them in a room and make them torture one another? There’s really no other way you could have done it? And I’m really supposed to believe that this group who can fund a science experiment to hook wires into peoples’ brains perfectly without causing any neurological damage to extract chemicals, can’t get any more efficient way to kidnap those people in the first place than just sending one woman out to trick people in the middle of the night at run-down gas stations on country roads. Uh huh. Sure.
Oh who cares, nobody put any thought into this. So I guess everyone just starts immediately freaking the fuck out, not bothering to have any rational thought. Bradley Cooper here, afraid of starring in Guardians of the Galaxy 2, pulls his wires out and immediately drops to the floor dead:
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| Oh, you’re saying that wasn’t what happened? Pfft...next you'll be telling me that WASN'T really Bradley Cooper at all! Well I say, I have never heard such baseless accusations. |
They all vote to just start beating the crap out of this one guy. The scene seems ridiculous at first, especially when after it’s done the one guy is just nonchalantly like “shit, this isn’t working.” But just picture Ulli Lommel in the beating victim’s place and it’ll be OK.
There’s also this one other girl, who I'm going to call Yellow Shirt Girl based off the color of her shirt, who is completely insane and horrible all the time. After Bradley Cooper-wannabe kills himself, she starts asking why none of the men will do more work to stop what’s going on. Mr. Take-a-Beating gets snarky with her and tells her he doesn’t want to hear any feminist crap. She freaks out on him and starts screaming so as to hurt the audience’s ears, but really I don’t see how asking men to do more work is feminist crap, so I think she should really be pissed off about the guy’s completely back-asswards view of feminism.
So then they strap Mr. Take-a-Beating to the table - not sure why they strap him down as he has volunteered… - and start whaling on him. They yank out some fingernails, burn him with an iron and beat his legs up. Yellow Shirt Girl gets way too into it though as she somehow musters up the strength to lift the guy up and break his leg clear in two pieces on the edge of the table. What, did she just eat a lot of spinach?
Oh and there’s also a scene where one kid suggests to Yellow Shirt Girl that having sex could also produce the same chemicals as being tortured. For some reason this is just glazed over throughout the entire film, which is weird because you’d think THAT would have been preferable to torturing one another, but whatever! Yellow Shirt Girl is disgusted by this and says she’d rather be tortured than have sex with that guy. Yup, because having consensual sex with some guy who was just asking with no threat of violence or harm is SO MUCH WORSE than being tortured! Fuck this.
The movie also has a habit of using really serious, dramatic music over the torture scenes, which I would say is retarded, but as my brain has been turned to apple sauce by this movie, I’ll say it works! After all, if it’s good enough for Lifetime movies and Hallmark commercials, it’s good enough to play over your shitty Saw-wannabe movie. There's also some other scenes of pregnancy-related drama, and honestly, who ever thought THAT was gonna be a good idea? Yeah I'm real sure this shitty gore-movie has what it takes to pull off a sensitive topic like pregnancy drama well.
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| It's just what I was saying before; this film has no idea what it's doing. Nothing fits. The pregnancy storyline tries to evoke drama but that is offset by the ridiculous plot and over the top gore going on. It never meshes together well at all. |
Yellow Shirt Girl spills boiling water all over the floor in an attempt to make the pain meter rise higher and get them all out of there faster. It doesn’t work, and they end up tying her up. She gets loose and accidentally kills one of the other girls. Her boyfriend then proceeds to go crazy and torture Yellow Shirt with everyone else in tow.
I know doing this helps them get to the right level of pain chemicals or whatever it is, but c’mon, it WAS kind of an accident...not sure that really means you have to torture her to death out of pure rage. I mean, hate her, yeah, but how does torturing her to death solve anything? It’s just weird because it’s played off more like we’re supposed to be happy they tortured and killed this girl, rather than feeling disgusted at what they’ve been driven to - I know they were TRYING to make it seem like the latter, but the film is so tonally confused it doesn’t work at all.
Then after that the videotape says they’re good now and can leave. They have to put their heads into this contraption on the wall which will remove the wires in their heads. Then they can leave through the door. It all goes pretty well until this guy is randomly revealed to be evil:
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| So if this guy was evil the whole time and working with the scientists, why didn't he tell them how to get the pain meter up higher and higher? Why did he instead let them beat the crap out of each other first in ways that did very little to further their goals? How come he even had to be in there at all? I mean, there's just no sense to any of this. |
Yeah, because I guess they needed someone to be the villain. I get the idea they didn’t intend this guy to be evil at all; they just hit a wall in the writing process and had to choose someone at random. I mean there really is no fucking reason this guy would be evil - it’s never even really explained why he had to be in there with them, or what his real motivations are. He’s just evil! How did that magnificent writing process go again?
Oh yeah.
So Tayler gets trapped back inside the house and the whole torture-timer starts all over again, making her have to torture herself to get back out. It takes her about two minutes of screentime, and all she does is stick her hand in a pot of boiling water and impale her hand on a nail - really? This was all the time it would have taken them to get out? Why did we even have the rest of this fucking movie then? It could’ve been over in five minutes!
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| This is just the hazing ritual for most sororities these days; man up! Or...woman up, I guess it would be instead... |
Unfortunately it’s deus ex machina time, as then some other crap happens that results in the chemicals in the wires in their heads killing them now. Tayler dies, Nick stabs the on-a-whim bad guy to death and then walks out the door...somehow surviving even though I thought the point was that they were dying now. This whole sequence takes up like 10 minutes of screentime, when you add in close-ups of Tayler crying and Nick and Mr. Baddie-Bad-Guy bantering - it’s really just like they didn’t have enough material to sustain a full movie, so instead they just padded everything out for no reason. You know, like most good filmmakers do.
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| "Quick, we need more padding! Hold this shot and have some melodramatic music playing over it to make it seem meaningful and shit!" |
We then get a scene of Nick in some diner ordering food. He sees the older woman from before who kidnapped them outside, follows her to the middle of nowhere where she’s trying to do it again, and kills her. So what, he didn't bother alerting law enforcement to what happened in that house? No investigations were done there? What about the parents or families of the other people who died? No questions asked about their disappearances or deaths? I just don't think eating breakfast at some random diner is the highest priority after the whole mess was over! Then again breakfast IS the most important meal of the day.
Oh well. Our hero, a murderer who didn't even tell the police about a highly sophisticated (or somewhat, anyway) torture operation kidnapping innocent people, thus damning more people to suffer similar fates, then sits in a car looking super serious and another song plays to close the film, beginning with the line “FUCK IT!”
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| That's the weight of this whole ridiculous movie settling on his shoulders forever. |
Yeah, I think that about sums up the attitude of the filmmakers while making this garbage: fuck it!
I mean this whole thing is just nonsense. It’s completely valueless. There’s very little direction here, no atmosphere to speak of, the acting sucks, the story is contrived...there’s basically no reason to watch this thing. The fact that they managed to do exactly nothing right, achieving absolutely nothing they set out to, is a near miracle of horribleness though, and does tend to lend a certain degree of unintentional comedy to this. However, I don't think that justifies its existence. Fire the space lasers and destroy every copy of this movie now!
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