The Tortured

THE TORTURED (2010) - May 15, 2011
Oh, sweet Jesus.  Easily one of the worst movies I've seen in quite a while, this was an almost completely worthless horror film about the parents of a murdered child who decide to enact brutal vengeance on the man responsible for the death of their child.  There is pretty much nothing that works here.  In the first half hour or so, we see the parents deal with their grief over the death of their child and their anger at the lack of justice for the man responsible.  This stretch is laughably bad, thanks mostly to writer Marek Posival's horrendous, hammy dialogue and the completely awful performances (though to be fair to Erika Christensen and Jesse Metcalfe, there's not much that even the best actor in the world could do with such shoddy material).  Then there's the rest of the film, in which the parents torture the man who killed their son (or so they think... twist!).  It's pretty much all grisly torture at this point, and I'm really struggling to figure out what the point was.  Why would I want to watch this?  There's absolutely no suspense or tension, and the moral ambiguities of what the parents are doing remain almost completely unexplored (aside from the most surface level discussions of "hey, should we be doing this?" "Yup." "Okay!").  It's just pointless, gross torture.  Seriously, what's the point?  Why is this particularly story worth telling?  I mean, it's a pretty interesting premise, but the writer and director completely squander it.  I think I've said enough about why this movie sucks, but I should mention that the flat, TV-caliber direction was completely bland.  Oh, and that twist, seriously?  WTF.  It's a pretty neat twist I guess, but not surprisingly the film does nothing with it.  What do the two parents think about brutally torturing and causing the death of a completely innocent man?  That's pretty interesting, so of course the movie completely ignores it.  1/2*