After watching THE TORTURED you’re inclined to think that they should add stickers to all the DVD sleeves right below the marketing strap line “from the producers of SAW” that say, simply, and sarcastically, “yeah, you don’t say”. Overwrought from the get-go, this is a slicker-than-snot concoction of fast-cut suffering and torture leading inexorably in the SAW tradition to a climactic montage explaining The Big Twist that you know is coming for a long, long time. It’s frenetically paced and fond of messing around with time periods for no other reason than the SAW movies do it all time and – hey! – are they not clever?!
Like many of its ilk, THE TORTURED is not a bad movie in the sense that it’s never dull and delivers pretty much what you’d expect from its title and synopsis. There’s more than a whiff of contempt towards its intended audience, however, in the way it casually piles up a series of contrivances and wallows in manipulative sadism in the mistaken belief that the emotional content (which has all the depth – acting and otherwise – of a crap daytime soap) is strong enough to support it. This amped-up post-HOSTEL Fascistic take on the DEATH WISH revenge movie sets its wholly gratuitous tone quite early on with a sex scene that has no relevance or credibility within the unfolding plot, yet gets included just to shoe-horn a sex scene in.
Jesse Metcalfe and Erika Christensen are painfully miscast and unconvincing as normal middle-class parents driven to Wes Craven-ish extremes by a life-destroying tragedy. Their six year old son is abducted from his own front yard by one-note, all-purpose pedophile-mass murderer Bill Moseley (who gets a couple of characteristically maniacal Moseley moments), who has mutilated and killed him by the time the audience has settled into their seats. Moseley, thanks to The Freddy Krueger School Of Movie Justice, gets off with a relatively meager sentence, and the enraged parents, with not much hesitation, decide he needs to be punished. They stage an elaborate, astoundingly smooth-sailing breakout from a police transit vehicle, take the sicko to a remote cabin and, thanks to doctor Metcalfe’s knowledge of pain thresholds and physiology, keep him alive so as to endure endless hours of varied torment.
En-route to the Big Twist and the coincidences and contrivances that ensure its existence, this movie offers an insulting MTV-styled portrait of grief and tragedy, striving to get the audience behind the actions of the protagonists via corny, sentimentalized montage flashbacks of the kid. If you thought the death of Gage in Mary Lambert’s PET SEMATARY wait till you see how they handle the kid’s demise here. All but the most stupid of audiences will find it hard to be engaged emotionally with these phony actors : you would not believe them as normal, devastated parents even if the script was not full of clanging, comic book-level lines of dialogue.
On a visceral level, the movie at least delivers the quantity of bound-to-a-table graphic torture we now expect, as Metcalfe and Christensen become accustomed to breaking their captive’s toes, stubbing out fags on his chest, drowning him to the point of flat-lining and, most cringe-inducing, destroying his eardrums with needles. Even a throwaway dream sequence involves him being shown his own, yanked out liver. Though the twist makes a last-ditch bid to question and undermine their actions, the movie still plays out like a call to arms for grieving victims of violent crimes to take the law into their hands.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
