(2006) **
A woman wakes up in a coffin. After she kicks and claws for what seems like forever, she manages to escape this predicament only to find herself facing the butt of a rifle and being asked (in a very polite voice), “Do you wish to continue?” She is knocked out. After regaining consciousness she finds herself tied to a tree by her throat and standing precariously on a wobbly makeshift box, which is threatening to collapse at any minute. Lifting up her shirt she finds that her stomach is stitched up. Apparently she has a choice; either undo the stitches and stick her hand into her guts to retrieve a hidden razor to cut herself down, or perish. She takes out the stitches, rummages around in her gut, which is spilling out, gets the razor and attempts to free herself. It does not go well. Is this the opening of SAW IV you ask? Nope. It’s a low-budget, torture-porn offering that was obviously created to cash in on the recent SAW wave.
Fast forward. Hope has just come home from a blind date with a perfect man. After telling her best friend all about it, she goes to sleep only to wake up, you guessed it (see first paragraph). Thus ensues another version of the beginning all over again. Hope manages to free herself from these initial traps, with much gratuitous gore. She has motivation and refuses to be “broken” because her torturer, a man who bears a striking similarity to Van Helsing has also kidnapped her 6-year old daughter and hidden her away.
The film follows Hope and her many attempts at escape. Between these escape attempts, Hope is expected to do such menial tasks as cleaning The Man’s breakfast dishes and tending a pathetic garden. Eventually The Man acquires another woman who joins Hope in this terrible situation. Will the women ever gain the upper hand from this jerk? Will Hope ever see her kid again? Can Hope be “broken”? These are questions you might be mildly interested in having answered.
This is one of those frustrating movies where the heroine has plenty of opportunity to escape but always does the wrong thing. On at least three occasions The Man is either sleeping or knocked out. Rather than bashing his skull in or slitting his throat, she opts to do things like cut his leg. Of course he regains consciousness in all of Hope’s escape attempts and punishes her accordingly. The Man’s motivations are never made clear as he probably only has 10 sentences of dialogue in the entire film. A bleak ending provides zero relief from all we have sat through.
8 comments:
this is exactly the type of film i will NOT be watching this year.
But it's so good!
Okay, I lied.
i respect your love of the classic bad horror movie; i just don't share it. quality will be my guiding principle, at least initially. i plan to watch horror movies that are also actually good movies. i figure this will motivate me to watch more than i otherwise would.
I'll have absolutely nothing to do with B-level torture movies this year. But if JPX keeps watching them, I'll keep reading about'em!
I completely cannot deal with the torture porn. So I will also NOT be watching any.
We'll let jpx carry the torch for this one.
Great review jpx. You perfectly captured the terribleness of this film. I watched this with jpx, and I will add that I despised Hope and the man who bore a striking resemblance to Van Helsing. I can't call him by any other name because he had none. He was known simply as "The Man."
I must say, from that picture The Man scores extremely low on the menace scale.
Sigh. I'll probably check out some torture flicks this year. I genuinely dread it (not 100%, but it's there); at the same time I feel the need to address it and then get it out of the way.
The Man was not at all frightening, but rather pitiful. He said things like:
"Tend the garden, and if it dies I will kill you."
"Those pots and pans better be clean when I get back or else."
And he would inspect them very closely upon his return and shake his head in approval.
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