Let’s start with the characters. First we have Travis who plays your typical loud, obnoxious, misogynist frat boy. Apparently they couldn’t find anyone moderately attractive with muscles for the part so they settled on the first loud and outspoken guy that did a screen test for them,at least that’s the impression I got from watching Ila Schactler’s painful performance. Next in our cavalcade of crap we have Stephanie who plays a bitter, unattractive, feminist with a permanent chip on her shoulder and an outlook on life that almost made me want to shoot myself. Again the performance given by Michelle Roe was two dimensional, and even that might be adding one dimension too many. Finally we have Ryan, played by Michael Downey, who plays the geeky introvert that is usually behind the camera for most of the film but, brings nothing to the table that we haven’t seen a hundred times already and a hundred times more ably performed. Now I don’t expect a lot of depth out of characters in a horror film but, this terrible trio have about as much depth as a bottle cap.

Apparently what the characters lack in depth they also lack in motivation and brains. For one these three fairly normal, if obnoxious kids, who display no other psychotic tendencies throughout the movie just decide to kill someone because they are bored. To stretch a thin premise even thinner they decide to select the person at random from on campus. They have absolutely no motivation to do this terrible thing which I suppose the writers, Stuart Ball and Scott Phillips, who also directs, felt would add to the horror of the story. Sadly they were very much mistaken. Thin premise and motivation aside these three chuckleheads talk early on about being careful so they wouldn’t get caught. They end up discussing this plot, using the words murder several times, in a coffee shop amongst other public locations. When they finally choose their killing ground Travis decides it would be a good idea to cut his hand and “mark” the area. Sure leave that DNA evidence behind along with the beer bottles that you were swilling down and tossing away nearby with your fingerprints and DNA all over them. Haven’t these kids ever watched CSI? Apparently they were too busy being bored enough to kill to pay attention to prime time TV.

The style leaves a great deal to be desired. The whole film is shot in the faux documentary style that was popularized by “The Blair Witch Project”. Where “The Blair Witch Project” actually made the style work this movie showcases just how bad that can be when done improperly. Most of the shots in the film look like they were done by amateurs trying to imitate an amateur style. You end up with at least a dozen scenes with just shoes or crotches in the movie while the dialogue takes place off screen at a damn near inaudible level. If you have compelling visuals I can forgive quiet audio but, if you have crap and you couple that with audio that makes me strain to hear it then you have a whole new level of bad. The sometimes quiet audio would have been a bigger issue if the plot was actually worthwhile but, it took me about fifteen minutes of watching the movie to determine that I wasn’t missing much.

I do not recommend this movie unless you happen to be a masochist in need of pain, or you keep a masochist chained up in your basement. For everyone else out there give this stinker a pass or forever regret the hour and twenty-eight minutes of your life that you’ll never be able to get back. Remember Uncle Kreepshow loves you and there is no reason for you to watch a bad movie, especially not this one.

And there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, the movie would have been more successful if he had tried less for art-house obfuscation and more for the punch-in-the-gut terror that some moments in the movie produce. Although I didn’t love this movie, I respect it, and I think that most reviewers who dismissed it did so for the wrong reasons: they critiqued the violence, the supposed misogyny (more about that later), and the gratuitous gore. I could have stood a lot more of those things (minus the misogyny, which isn’t happening anyway) and less of the navel-gazing hand-held camera shenanigans that populate the first half of the film.

The movie begins with an absolutely gorgeous opening vignette, filmed in black and white, in which Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Defoe (both unnamed in the film) have sex in various parts of their palatial apartment to the tune of a gorgeous Handel aria. As Gainsbourg and Defoe go from room-to-room, their young son toddles from his crib, through the house, and climbs out of a window,  falling to his death. The juxtaposition of the absolutely beautiful scene, music, and sexual pleasure with the death of a young child is the first sign that von Trier is not afraid to really break the taboos of mainstream movies.

After the child’s death, Gainsbourg suffers a mental breakdown: she is filled with guilt and links her own sexuality with the loss of her child. Defoe, who happens to by a psychologist (though not a very good one, based on his methods) decides to take his wife’s mental health into his own hands. He tells her that she has to face her fears, not run from them. He makes her go to the place she fears the most, a cabin in the woods (called Eden, hmmm…) where she worked on her unfinished dissertation about medieval images of women. Von Trier’s heavy-handedness comes through in this first half of the movie, where the viewer is forced to sit through abstract conversations about fear and grief and to ponder the thuddingly obvious symbolism of Eden, death, and sexuality.  But then we get to Eden, and all hell breaks loose. In a good way.

From here, the movie goes from the usual grimy, quick-cut, hand-held camera of Von Trier’s previous movies to a more interesting and lush use of setting and camera. Von Trier creates a terrifying forest, one that looks, on the surface, to be dreamy and lush, populated with beautiful deer and animals. But even the animals are not-quite-right, and the ground burns Gainsbourg’s feet right through her shoes. The sky rains acorns and the wind blows open windows.

I won’t give anything away by discussing what happens in the cabin between Defoe and Gainsbourg, but suffice it to say that this is not a date-movie and will make both men and women cross their legs and grimace with vicarious pain. Von Trier doesn’t hold back in showing damage done to the human body and in making sexual scenes incredibly unsexy.

Ultimately, Anti-Christ is about a woman so consumed with guilt about her child’s death and so convinced of her own culpability that she takes on the misogynistic images of women from history (the woman as the witch, the vagina dentata, the woman as closer to nature, closer to the body, and therefore closer to the devil). The movie doesn’t support misogyny– the character believes herself to be the awful things that women have been accused of being. If von Trier had focused more on Gainsbourg’s own guilt and deepening insanity and less on making a grand statement about nature and evil, then he would have a truly interesting movie. Unfortunately, he feels the need to give us talking foxes and visual metaphors that don’t make sense or make sense too simply to be useful.

I have to stop and give Charlotte Gainsbourg her due for this film. The dialogue throughout the movie is awful–both Gainsbourg and Defoe speak in the careful, deadening tones of a badly-written undergrad philosophy essay–but Gainsbourg puts her all into this role. It’s hard to imagine the emotional depths she goes to, the things she has to do, and how fully she commits to the role of a woman who spends 90% of the movie insane with grief and half-naked. She makes the character neither hat-eable nor easily sympathetic–she is complicated and troubled, but not easy to categorize.

This movie is deeply flawed, but beautiful and awful and truly powerful–it’s more like an opera than a movie, all emotion and expression with little logic. If you go to it willing to overlook some of von Trier’s more tedious bits of arty exposition, it’s well worth the effort.

Book of Blood is not a masterpiece. In fact it is a largely underwhelming and uninspiring film that lacks the visceral punch one is accustomed too in a Clive Barker adaptation. Instead writer/director John Harrison opts to go down the atmospheric haunted house route – aiming perhaps for the thick and cloying mood of The Others (2001) or The Orphanage (2007). It is a brave strategy in a current marketplace overflowing with sadistic torture and gut crunching mayhem. In such a film the pressure on dialogue, performance, and suspense is increased exponentially and Book of Blood falls down in all these key areas. Harrison’s screenplay conflates the Barker short stories ’The Book of Blood’ and ’On Jerusalem Street’ and part of the films unevenness comes from this clumsy attempt to fuse together two stories. The narrative proposes the idea that on a parallel plane to our own exist highways of the dead, and on these highways are intersections. The house where the bulk of the action is situated is on one of these intersections. The film is told in the form of a flashback as Simon McNeal (Jonas Armstrong – BBC TV’s Robin Hood) explains the circumstances of his transformation into a living book of blood too a man who has been paid to relieve him of his skin.

This decision to tell the story this way reduces a great deal of suspense as we approach the narrative armed with the knowledge of McNeal’s eventual fate. This leaves us with just a series of ghostly apparitions to look forward too. Unfortunately the intersection is a mess of unconvincing digital effects, and one of numerous elements of the film that are a let down. McNeal’s attempts at hoaxing the spectral events seem utterly pointless, especially in light of the fact that the house does have a genuine ghostly presence. The paranormal investigator Mary Florescu (Sophie Ward) is a dreadfully dull creation whose character trajectory from academic researcher to scribe of the undead to someone who pays to acquire McNeil’s skin doesn’t ring true, and the potential thematic value of exploring the lengths an academic might go too in order to push their heads above the parapet set by their contemporaries is fumbled by a screenplay determined to create a villain where one doesn’t really exist. The performances are ponderous and humourless which is a surprise considering the vein of black humor that runs through much of Barker’s work. Perhaps the worst crime of Book of Blood is to be completely unmemorable. Barker’s material has a habit of clinging resolutely to one’s psyche, so that short stories one might have read fifteen years ago remain festering in the subconscious. This film had the potential to stand out, but a combination of desultory performances, mishandled digital effects, and weak atmospherics, damages this film beyond repair.

The movie is loosely based on the death of Sylvia Likens in the 50’s, a horrifying group torture and murder of a teenager girl by her adult guardian and apparently several other children her age over the period of several weeks. The true story is horrifying enough (and was made into the drama An American Crime), but Ketchum’s novel adds some interesting twists: the element of sexual competition between the adult guardian and the girl as well as the guilt of one of the children who knows about the torture but does not participate. Unfortunately, the stale, by-the-numbers direction, script, and acting in this movie drain the film of any possible tension and give no insight into the event.

The subject matter here, of course, would never result in a “fun” horror movie–the death and sexual assault of a very young teenage girl by an adult woman and her teenage sons is not going to be a popcorn movie. So what does a movie like this do? It could provide tension, for one, a sense that the two main characters, Aunt Ruth and Meg, are two forces pitted against each other. It could also provide some insight into aunt Ruth, some sense of the need, misery, and insecurities that might prompt her behavior. The movie could also provide an interesting perspective of the setting–the underbelly of the apparent idyllic and squeaky-clean 50’s could make an interesting contrast to what’s happening in Aunt Ruth’s basement. The movie doesn’t seem to know how to approach these topics, though. It skitters around, from hinting at the sexual curiosity of the boys (and how it is fed by Ruth) and the contrast between the outward appearance of Ruth and what happens behind closed doors, but it never commits to a particular idea or spends enough time in a scene to make it clear exactly what we are dealing with.

Suspense or thrills are pretty much nonexistent: the movie gives away everything too quickly. It’s established from the beginning that Aunt Ruth is a bit off her rocker and that she has gained the trust of the neighborhood kids, who will therefore probably never tell on her. Aunt Ruth is a bitter single woman who wears pounds of pancake makeup and allows her sons and a group of neighborhood boys to hang out around her house, drinking beer and cursing. She’s supposed to be the “cool” woman in the neighborhood, but her scary-clown makeup and creepy, overtly sexual flirtations with the boys is more macabre than “cool”–no teenage boy in their right mind would watch their 50-year-old mother lift up her skirt in front of their friends and not be a little uncomfortable.

The child actors in the movie aren’t awful, but they aren’t good enough to carry the film. Meg, the primary victim of Aunt Ruth, doesn’t have much of a personality, which makes it hard to really empathize with the horrible things that happen to her or to believe the supposed budding romance between her and the neighbor boy, Billy. The group of neighborhood boys and Ruth’s sons are largely interchangeable–they have slicked-back hair and a well-developed disdain for women, apparently developed from Aunt Ruth’s disparaging remarks about sluts and other women in general. The one “good kid”, Billy, is so characterless that I forgot from scene to scene which one he was.

The primary problem here is the direction and acting, not the script. There were several moments in the movie where Aunt Ruth said something that seemed like a good insight into her behavior and that could have been absolutely chilling and effective performed by another actor. The scenes between Billy and his womanizing father, too, bear some fascinating moments where we get an idea of exactly why Billy might be conflicted about telling what is happening in the house next door. When his father explains that you should never hit a woman unless she’s really asking for it, you can see Billy thinking back to Aunt Ruth and her reasons for abusing Meg and wondering if maybe he is the one who’s crazy. But the good writing can’t overcome the limited acting and uninteresting direction.

This low-budget movie simply doesn’t have the talent behind it to do the material justice, and it isn’t in a the least bit fun, frightening, or surprising.

Everything about this movie screams “Mystery Science Theater 3000″. The basic plot is a bit kooky, but has potential– two hillbilly gardeners Billy Buck (John Smihula) and Jacob (Adam Beske) move to the New Jersey ‘burbs where their lawn maintenance business is boming.  Soon, however, they grow tired of being treated like dirt by their rich yuppy clients.  This leads to a violent killing rampage as the two sadistically torture pretty, young, shallow suburbanites to death.  What will it take to stop these two deranged landscapers from drenching the entire town in blood and gore?

This movie has the feel of a subpar student film.  One gets the sense that Billy Buck is supposed to be almost sympathetic since his vengeful violence is aimed at upsetting the status quo of  greed and materialism.  He’s driven by a strong sense of injustice– the kind of injustice that can only be remedied by butchering young rich people, tearing off their faces and slowly disembowling them.  He looks like a WWE cast-off with black war-paint circling his eyes, bare-chested under denim overalls.  Being surrounded by materialistic, insipid yuppies is what drives Billy Buck to murder.  Jacob, on the other hand, kills because he enjoys it.  He’s more of a stereotypical masked lunatic with serious self-esteem issues.  The rest of the cast is essentially a string of bland, no-name actors, all generically attractive in a fluffy-haired 1980s model way. They all portray snobby, up-and-coming Wall Street bankers or doctor’s wives.  The acting is painfully stilted and hollow.  A tough psychologist (Maura Del Veccio) whose role is meant to be vital to the story, blends in so much with the other actresses that it’s tough to tell who’s who and why her character is important at all.

They Don’t Cut the Grass Anymore skimps on some areas of production, yet it goes all out as far as blood and gore is concerned.  The special effects range from above average to downright ridiculous.  Violence to excess is the motto for director Nathan Schiff.  At first, seeing what’s obviously a dummy having an unconvincing mask being slowly pulled from its skull fits right in with the over-the-top dark humor of the rest of the movie.  But the longer that the endless torture scenes went on, the more uncomfortable I felt watching them.  Sure, the victims aren’t especially likeable. Yeah, they robotically deliver lines like, “It’s you I love, not just your body!” in scenes of seduction.  Yet evisceration seems like a steep price to pay for their transgressions.  The way the camera lingers almost lovingly on images of flesh being ripped apart, bleeding and then peeled away as the killers scoop out internal organs is disturbing.

I can see where the director was attempting to use this movie as a commentary on the culture of greed and capitalism that tainted the early-to-mid 1980s.  Somehow, though, amidst the overtly ridiculous plot contrivances and excessive torture-porn, the message gets drowned out.

Japanese horror has always been the front and center of my DVD collection. There are a number of ghostly and eerie images that have stuck in my mind from many of the genres classics. These films certainly have their ways of terrifying the audience, and in most cases, they come hand and hand with enough mystery and storytelling to keep my interest in the films from start to finish. Living Hell is no different, but what it does do is pay homage to Hooper’s original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I’ll admit, at first, this sounded like a terrible idea, and it took me awhile to finally pop this film into the DVD player to see how it would all unfold. Once I did, like many other J-Horror films tend to do, it sucked me in. Still, although the film does build suspense and terror in all the right ways, it manages to find difficulty in fulfilling the many moods that it tries to produce from scene to scene. This, of course, was something that Tobe Hooper had no problem doing in TCM.

Much of Living Hell in straight-up torture film making. Our Antagonist is a younger gentleman who is bound by his wheel chair. His family is unfortunate enough to welcome in two very strange (and soooo creepy) relatives. These relatives are seemingly unknown to our main character and right off the get-go they are hell-bent on seeking him out as a target. Throughout the film, the two relatives torture our antagonist with throwing darts, electric shocks, pulled teeth, and of course the good ol’ hammer to the hand fiasco! It all sounds brutal, but the film keeps an odd sense of humor to each of the torture scenes until you almost believe that our main character isn’t in as much pain as you might anticipate. Now, he far from enjoys all this violence, but it’s not the directors intend to build the suspense through all the bloodshed. Rather than this, the film focuses more on the mysteries behind the family, and what secrets the two evil relatives are hiding from its unknowing members. Again, it’s the story that will keep you interested in this film, and if not that (not digging the TCM crutch?), the mysterious relatives have the presents and posture that is associated with many of J-Horror’s most ghostly characters. Shugo Fujii, the film’s director, luckily shows the right talents needed in order to create wonderful character presentations. The only gripe I had with his techniques was the fact that too much of the time a very tense scene would be diminished to awkwardness on the account that humor and sadistic behavior had to someway correspond in nearly every scene. If anything, this was distracting. It made Living Hell seem like less of a horror film, and more of an experiment on how talented the director and actors can be at mimicking the insane members of the cannibalistic family in TCM. Again, why bother when it seems as if Shugo could have made a fantastic horror film without all the classic imitations.

It’s best to take Living Hell as a completely separate film from Texas Chainsaw, but I’ll have to say, that’s hard to do. Toward the end of the film, you’ll find some blatant similarities, and it’s actually those scenes that will make you want to leave the story and give up on the film all together. BUT, if you try to NOT wrap your brain around all of the comparisons, take each scene with a grain of salt, and bring your sense of humor on board…you might find yourself enjoying the better parts of Living Hell. If you stick with it till the end, the story will also offer enough twists and turns for you to feel that you not only didn’t waste your time with Living Hell, but that within all of it’s mimicked mishaps, an original story still wanted to jump out and grab your attention…and it will.

If only I had had been twisted enough to think of locking someone in a room with a bear-trap rigged to their head, I could be a part of the most lucrative horror franchise in history and be well on my way to penning the much anticipated “Jig Saw’s Uncle Ginsu’s Killer Cutlery, part 7 of 9, volume 4, episode 6: The Revenge.”  If only.    Maybe then I could kiss my office corner goodbye (note: I didn’t say “corner office” because I do, in fact, sit in an actual corner – sans cubicle – in a hallway, no less) and have legions of fans lining up for the latest installment of gruesome doo-hickery.

Love it or hate it, you’ve got to admit that Leigh Whannell – the Melbourne-born writer who is responsible for spawning the Saw phenomenon – has got it made. This guy has cranked out the same exact movie six times running and movie-goers are still begging for more.  Maybe the resounding success of the Saw franchise is a testament to the notoriously short American attention span. Or it might be attributable to our society’s thinly veiled appetite for gratuitous violence. Or maybe people just like saws.  Whatever the reason is, I don’t get it.

I just know I’m jealous that I didn’t come up with it first.

Deadgirl has a simple plot: two deadbeat teenagers, one rather sweet and aimless (Ricky) and another clearly evil and unhinged (JT), break into an old mental hospital. As they pick around the creepy, atmospheric place, they come across a woman chained and cuffed to a bed, naked. She’s dehydrated and emaciated, her gums receding from her teeth. She seems to be dead at first (hence the movie title), but she opens her eyes, groans, and writhes around on the gurney, her faintly yellowish skin covered in sweat. Ricky suggests that they call the police. JT, though, tells him to wait. He wants to get to know her a little bit better.

The next day, when Ricky meets JT back at the abandoned hospital, JT tells him that the woman can’t die. He knows because he tried to kill her several times–he snapped her neck and shot her in the chest.  At this point, one would expect Ricky to have more of a reaction than his mopey, somewhat resistant shrug, but he doesn’t say much. JT, surprisingly, comes to the conclusion that they should keep this woman who can’t die down in the basement for their own pleasure. Ricky doesn’t participate in raping a deadish woman chained to a bed, but he doesn’t seem too concerned about her, either. He’s more concerned about his unlikely love interest, Joann, a popular, cheerleaderish girl who is out of his league.

Deadgirl is an odd mix of tones and aims. It seems to be saying something about men, sex, power, and violence. The Deadgirl of the title is the extreme of passivity. Punch her, hit her, spit on her–she doesn’t react. And the men/boys in the movie are so consumed by their own desires for sex and domination that this woman seems like a welcome change from the girls at school who are so inaccessible and demanding. This Deadgirl is their dream–a woman who can’t complain, talk, or move.

The young, relatively unknown actors do well in their parts, as far as the parts go. Noah Segan, as JT, is menacing and creepy as the mastermind of the rape-the-dead-girl project. His character doesn’t make much sense, but he plays it with a slimy, deranged energy. Sholoh Fernandex, as Ricky, is a fairly convincing foil to JT, but only in the twisted universe that directors Sarmiento and Harel create, where men are so desperate for control and power that a vague distaste for rape represents the moral center of the movie. And maybe that’s the point: if left to their own devices, men would beat, rape, and exploit women. Is this the director’s point? It’s not an assertion I agree with and it’s a bleaker view of humanity than I’ve seen in a very long time, even from a horror movie.

It’s hard to know what to make of this movie. In some ways, it’s pure exploitation, a film that shows what’s taboo in real life: a woman being beaten to death and then raped over and over again, for example. These scenes are I Spit on Your Grave and Irreversible levels of horrifying, but I suspect we aren’t supposed to react to them with the kind of outrage  and horror that those movies engendered because the woman is “dead” (what that means in the context of the film, I’m not sure). But the movie seems to be interested in examining (and critiquing) the male libido, too, which leaves me confused.

This is not an entertaining horror movie. It’s a very well-made, moody, interesting, and disgusting movie. I’m curious about what the directors and writers will do in the future, but I can’t say I understand this movie, its target audience, or its goals. It seems too cerebral for the Saw crowd but too steeped in horror conventions for the art-house crowd. The overwhelming feeling I had after seeing this movie was sadness, not horror. I didn’t much enjoy entering the world this movie creates, but I did feel that I had been there and back.

The shifts in tone and atmosphere are subtle at first. Hints and clues as to Asami’s past and background, fragmentary flashbacks of an abused childhood, enigmatic and ghostly sequences which owe much to the Kaidan or avenging spirit motif popularised in J-horror hits like Ring (1997), the introduction of temporal confusion. The colour scheme also begins to shift, subtly at first, before drenching the film in cold blues, mysterious greens and sickly yellows that hint at the inner decay and perversion to come. Despite this formal explosion, nothing can compare to the films violent denouement. It is shocking, harrowing and difficult to sit through, mainly because of the sound effects, but also because of the obvious enjoyment Asami gains from slowly torturing her helpless male victim.

Miike denies that there is a political reading to be found in Audition but this hasn’t stopped Western critics groping to understand the film through any means possible. In the West it was hailed in some quarters for its feminist qualities, but any attempt to turn Asami into a positive or heroic figure is deeply flawed and controversial. The film also makes perfunctory attempts to discuss the female role in Japanese society, and its clear that male resentment of women in the workplace exists. The film works best from the perspective of gender and audience manipulation. What makes the film so exceptional is that succeeds in an age in which films rarely hold any surprises for us. Most of the secrets a film have are exposed by trailers or clod hopping critics. Miike consciously plays on Western perceptions of Asian cruelty, and its no surprise that its images of sadistic torture found greater success in the west. The film is a melting pot of trans-national signifiers, it plays with Japanese conventions, whilst simultaneously flirting with a western brand of horror and the politics of cult film reception. Audition confirmed Takashi Miike as a filmmaker of note, to laud him as an auteur is perhaps a step too far (Audition was cast, written and budgeted before Miike was invited to direct it), but one thing is certain, Audition is a significant and important film.

Jennifer Tree (Elisha Cuthbert) is everywhere. Billboards, television, magazines…she IS America’s next top model. But here, the famous blond is unhappy. She hardly gets anytime to herself. While Jennifer’s depression sinks in it lowers her guard and leaves it just a little easier for her to be stalked. After a long day of photo shoots Jennifer goes to a very uppity club with her dog, (Yes people with her dog. I don’t get it either.) where she is drugged with an Appletini and subsequently kidnapped by our unseen villain…

When Jennifer wakes up, she hears the ocean and even sees the beach from where she lies. However, it’s all a clever ruse to throw her off guard. The ocean is nothing but sound effects and a projected beach image on a screen. Jennifer soon realizes she’s in a sort of prison and freaks out.

Jennifer is coerced into doing things like change her clothes and eat vitamins by an ever present host that she cannot see. When she’s a bad girl and doesn’t do as her captor bids, she is gassed and punished. And by punished I mean fed a blender of freshly pureed body parts forced down her throat via funnel. Um…eww. It’s kind of an awesomely grotesque scene. The other punishments are just as great…threatened with acid in the face or having to shoot her own dog or herself. I hated that dog anyway.

After what seems like a day of imprisonment, Jennifer realizes there is someone is a cell next to hers and she’s not in this alone. Gary (Daniel Gillies) thinks he’s been in his cell for at least three days. The two decide they’ll find a way out together. Eventually Gary and Jen form a bond just in time to find out it’s probably the last day they will be kept alive. This is where the film offers us a twist, all be it the most obvious one, but a twist none the less.

Captivity has a great premise and it’s gonna suck you in. I loved it. The torture games Jennifer is forced to play are a bit reminiscent of Saw, but the movie as a whole is interesting enough that you forgive its unoriginal nature. And the scenes at the very end of the film brings us full circle to the mummified tube tortured dude at the beginning …I’ll let you decide if you find it a bit hack. So, yeah, it got me. Captivity sucked me in and for the most part it’s a thrilling horror film, it certainly made me look over my shoulder as I sipped my next Appletini.

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