Who's In It: Elisha Cuthbert, Daniel Gillies, Pruitt Taylor Vince
The Basics: The movie opens with an unnamed male model, bound and immobile, being force-fed car battery fluid. I think the filmmakers believed that this would help their case when the inevitable misogyny accusations are thrown at them. And boy, will those accusations be thrown. Anyway, what happens next is Elisha Cuthbert being trapped, terrified and repeatedly tortured as well, while wearing a sexy dress and stiletto heels. And that's pretty much the whole movie. No real setup, minimal explanation as to why it's happening. Just another Tuesday at the super-tech-advanced House of Doom.
What's The Deal? Never let it be said that I don't like gory, amoral torture movies. I think my credentials as a fan of that sort of thing are well established here. But it'd be nice if these guys knew how to balance the nonstop repulsion with some kind of … what's the word I'm looking for … POINT. At least the Hostel and Saw movies present themselves as being about something other than the literal. And even meaninglessness and stupidity wouldn't be so much of a crime if there were imagination or style or heavy, crushing, evil forcefulness to back it up. But the brain trust behind this movie chose to withhold all of that, too.
Pedigree: From the stinky bag of tricks of old-school schlock-master Larry Cohen (It's Alive and Maniac Cop, both way better movies than this) and the wacky directorial eye of Roland Joffé, a man everyone likes to remind you made The Killing Fields. And after that he made Super Mario Bros., that Demi Moore Scarlet Letter where they decided to throw out the book's original ending and make it more feminist, and the dead-in-the-water comedy Goodbye Lover.
A Short List of Things You'll Learn About Women From Watching This Movie:
1. If they are models, then they are stupid and deserve to be punished for their shallow lives.
2. You can do all sorts of nasty crap to them like force-feed them a smoothie made of eyeballs and ears and guts, and their makeup and hair will stay perfect. Even after they cry about it a little, that mascara will stay put. They won't even puke it all back up.
3. After all of this, they will be horny for any man who comes along that seems nice, and they'll even probably want to bang them right there in the torture chamber. In fact, the more you torture them, the sluttier they get. I know, hot, right?