The Tortured

A nasty piece of work that's been hanging around for two years looking for an audience.

Robert Lieberman's Perverted Justice advert spins its wheels with scene after scene impatiently cut like a montage sequence.

It's bluntly written, poorly shot and edited, and cruel without being clever.

A last-minute twist implicating the audience in the bloodlust isn't clever so much as hypocritical.

There's an opportunity here for screenwriter Marek Posival and director Robert Lieberman to play up the squeamishness of upper-middle-class torturers who don't fit the profile, but they're too busy tending to horror-thriller clichés.

Veering from ridiculous to revolting, The Tortured would like to be about more than singed nipples and seared skin. And it is: It's also about cracked toes and lanced eardrums.

The movie is so inept - with its flat characters, histrionic acting, dull dialogue ("Killing him is not going to change anything"), a dreadfully overdone musical score and la-la-la flashbacks starring the kid - that its clichés grow slightly funny. But not funny enough to make the endless torture scenes bearable.

This horror movie comes from twisted pictures, the same production company that does the Saw films. One can see that this film lives in the shadows of Saw as one of the weaker torture porn entries. Like Saw it has the huge problem of terrible editing. Sometimes it feels like the film is buffering, but in actuality it is the atrocious fades and cuts. The film also has your lack luster jump scares and sound cues so it can hit its quota with horror tropes. The biggest issue this film has is that it does not have an ending. Maybe it does; the last 15 minutes were so bad it was hard to tell. Regardless, this movie has so many plot holes in it, therefore, you end up with a very empty movie. It is like watching grass grow, you watch as nothing really changes and nothing affects you. I like how the performances get better throughout the picture, as the first thirty minutes are nearly unwatchable. The film tries to add layers of suspense, but it is ultimately the movie viewers who are being tortured.

For a movie called "The Tortured", I feel pretty tortured from watching it. I would've given it negative stars if it was possible. This wannabe horror-movie thriller is badly acted, coarsely edited, the audio is unsynchronized, the list goes on and on. Oh, and of course it's disgustingly graphic, which can be justified and work in some movies (i.e. Se7en), but it was just unbearable and gross in this movie. To start off, this movie's plot just screams cliché. In fact, a good way to describe this movie is just one big horror movie cliché. The horrible plot is this: A psychotic man kidnaps a couple's son while the dad is distracted and the wife is at work. The police can't find ****, and of course the mom, being emotionally vulnerable as she should be, blames the cops for not finding her son. Screw logic! I mean seriously, investigations take a long time, and if the killer left no clues or evidence, then it will be harder. But, the mom just "needs someone to blame", as she says later, and of course she has to stick it on the hard-working, low-paid officers. Then, the police find the man, illegally enter his home, only to discover the son is already dead. Wow. Then, as the clichés roll on, the couple decide to get revenge on the man. Nothing in this movie ever deviates from formula. In fact, I'm not even sure if there IS a formula to this movie, as it seems like a jumbled mess. Besides the formulaic, cliché plot line, the editing is horrible. Many times, a character might be saying something but their mouth isn't moving, or it's unsynchronized. Hence, the title of my review. Whoever edited this movie needs to go back to film school immediately. Another thing is the picture and cinematography. The whole movie, save the flashbacks, is all washed out in color. This is a misconception with horror film directors that by washing out your film, it makes it scarier. All it does is make you look desperate and your film look amateurish. On another note, the cinematography was also abysmal, scoring no points for this otherwise dismal film. The shots were rough, almost feeling like a montage. They would have the same shot just moved a couple of inches over. Why they felt the need to do that is beyond me. Also, the shots had no style or feel to them, as if the editor and cinematographer just said "screw it" and slapped together the shots to make this movie. Moreover, the movie is disgustingly graphic. What was once fresh and gripping in Se7en is now overall gross and appalling here. The couple shows no mercy as they torture their sons killer. At least John Doe had SOME shred of human decency! Additionally, it was horribly acted. I cannot fathom how these actors made it into Hollywood. They cannot act! I am half confident that I could do a better job then they did! Jesse Metcalf just sulked and sat there while Erika Christensen blathered on about how they would move on and find a better life. That was the whole first half of the movie. Also, the script was disappointing. The dialogue was-- yes, you guessed it!-- all clichés! Jesse Metcalf says to Erika Christensen, "Killing (our sons killer) isn't going to change anything." Wow, the screenwriters couldn't come up with anything more original? That's sad. To close, this was an abysmal, depressing, disgustingly graphic D movie with D list stars. I leave you with one thing: You'd be hard-pressed to find a worse horror movie then this.