The Tortured (2010)

Running Time: 79 minutes

Release Date: August 28, 2010

Review by: Stacey

Looking at the cover, my eyes were immediately drawn to the words at the top right: "From the producers of Saw".  I knew what I was about to get myself into because anything with the name Twisted Pictures attached to it is going to be in the vein of it's previous films that gave "the house that Wan built" it's torture porn notoriety; most notably Saw.  Unlike Saw and it's many sequels that followed, The Tortured was straight to VOD and as the title suggested, it was torture to watch a lot of the time.  


 

The Tortured follows the story of an upper middle class couple, Elise and Craig, played by Erika Christensen and Jesse Metcalf as their world around them turns to shit when their 6 year old son, Ben, is kidnapped before the father's eyes in their front yard.  You get an eerie look into the abductor's (played by Bill Moseley) house of horrors, and find out the boy is brutally murdered shortly after.  John Kozlowski is apprehended and charged for the crime but is only given 25-to-life for divulging the locations of OTHER victims of his.  To the grief-stricken couple, this just simply isn't enough.  They hatch a wacky plan to hijack the prison transport van, steal Kozlowski and exact their revenge in the only way they can imagine: extreme torture.

At this point, I don't even know where to start.  Directed by Robert Lieberman and written by Marek Posival, a lot of their work wasn't as strong as it should have been.  The script was shaky and the acting didn't lend any helping hand to it.  If it's possible to overact while not acting much at all, Christensen nailed it.  Her reactions to any of the situations, especially finding out her son was brutally murdered seemed forced and not very genuine.  As for Metcalf, I mean, he was better than Christensen.  I'm not sure how much that says for him.

The torture scenes themselves were over-the-top and actually made you lose sympathy for the couple as the movie progressed.  It almost felt like the film didn't go anywhere satisfying in its 79 min runtime.  You don't just become this bloodthirsty, torturing maniac because your son was murdered.  I see why you would WANT to be, but there's a difference between wanting to burst someone's eardrum, burn their flesh and break their bones and ACTUALLY doing it.  Don't even get me started on the unnecessary sex scene.  You have to be a special type of shithead before this happened to commit these acts.  I mean, see, we shouldn't even be rationalizing with the abductor, but here we find ourselves doing just that when watching The Tortured.

When it comes down to it, there wasn't anything innovative about The Tortured.  There were the usual revenge thriller tropes that you've come to recognize.  Especially when it seems that certain aspects could be traced back to The Last House On The Left.  I get it, but this film teetered on the fence of whether it wanted to be a torture porn wholeheartedly or an intense drama.  And then they tried to pull a bullshit twist on us that most horror fans of Bill Moseley would catch wayyyyy before the big reveal.  And if you didn't catch it until the end, it still wasn't very shocking.  I literally said "Oh, well, that sucks."

And I think that sentence sums up my thoughts about The Tortured.

1/5 broken toes in a vice

If you feel like submitting yourself to this torture, check it out on Netflix now!