DVD Review: THE TORTURED; Uninspiring, cliched, torture-porn

Ever since 'Saw' exploded onto screens in 2004, critics have thrown around the reductive term "torture porn", sticking it to anything that prided itself on the unashamed use of gore and guts. That tendency to pigeon-hole genre films has lead to some commentators wrongly classifying films like 'The Tortured' as like 'Saw' and 'Hostel' - the fact is that 'Saw' is nothing like 'Hostel': the original 'Saw' film is in fact a lot more camp than either 'Hostel' or the million copy-cat torture porn movies that skewed Saw's influence. There is definitely a lot more in terms of self-conscious excess (just look at the villain!) and it has a great deal more in common with older horror movies that valued thrills and suspenseful atmosphere above simple exploitation and gore.

I would put it to anyone willing to listen that the modern proliferation of additions to the torture exploitation genre is the natural development for a society that deems itself above the liminal segregation of minorities in its culture. When a society is advanced enough (usually in a moment of delusional self-diagnosis) to no longer advance the stereotypes of discrimination on screen, it turns to a more supposedly universal subject for exploitation - everyone within its boundaries. And who better to personify that universal majority than a happy suburban family (Jesse Metcalfe and Erika Christensen), young attractive, with a child and careers and a car, whose world is turned upside down when a pedophile (Bill Moseley) takes and murders their child before the police are able to intervene. The consequence, and the main focus of the narrative, is the couple's decision to take the law into their own hands when the killer is given only twenty five to life, kidnapping him and torturing him.

This is not the helpless middle class horror of the excellent 'Eden Lake', where the central couple are tormented by a gang of wayward teenagers who take their anti-social behaviour disgustingly far: here, the couple are equipped with the opportunity to exact some bodily revenge on the pedophile who killed their child, revisiting as much pain and extended suffering on him as is possible.

Really, 'The Tortured' is a horror movie for and about right-wing American suburbanites (the equivalent to perpetually outraged and socially terrified Daily Express readers in Britain) who believe that the most terrifying thing is the threat of crime that goes hand in hand with the dilution of social and moral values. These are the people who believe that there is a pedophile on every corner waiting to jump out and snatch their kids, or that every young person who chooses to wear a hoody should be immediately given a Community Service Order and locked up for the good of the populous. They are also the unashamed (though probably unreachable) demographic for this movie, because the film also offers the most perverse exorcism of those societal fears; the on-screen torture of the offending pedophile working as some perverse revenge pornography.

As I mentioned briefly there, 'The Tortured' will never get over the problem that its immediate audience (middle classers who would love to exact some revenge on the their criminal tormentors, or imagined tormentors) will never actually get to watch the film. The idea to pitch the film as an oddly (and incoherently) moralising torture exploitation flick will ensure that anyone who could take enjoyment out of its basest ideas wont touch it with a large stick from distance. That attempt by director Rob Lieberman to offer a form of balance, and deal with the weightier subject matter of moral relativity is also incredibly badly handled- you can tell Liberman knows what he is doing with the gore scenes, and that is dialed up to such an extent that the film becomes nothing more than a ballet of repulsive cheap thrills with a hugely diluted, inconsequential side-track of the question of moral relativity.

And as if attempting to lock out the other audience the film-makers have tried to appeal to with that tonal choice (i.e. the torture porn aficionados), 'The Tortured' spends too much time and effort on the moralising agenda, having the vengeful couple hum and harr over what they are doing is morally right. So even though Lieberman can do torture porn as well as the next slightly deranged auteur of gore, he makes the mistake of undervaluing that one appealing facet (appealing to some) by following the same badly trodden path of too many other modern torture-exploitation films of late and trying to shoe-horn in a message. It's like trying to add a Health and Safety message in the under-current to a Marx Brothers comedy- nobody wants it and nobody will be able to ignore it and just enjoy the usually engaging parts.

Everyone else, like myself, will find the film pretty uninspiring: there is nothing new, and there is very little to be taken in terms of pleasure from the torture scenes or the underlying narrative construct of the paedophile/dead child idea. The mechanisms of horror are also very cliched: It all just leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and it really doesn't help that Jesse Metcalfe cannot act to save his life: he should probably stick to being the impossibly good looking side-character whose good to look at but who knows he doesn't have a hope of carrying a compelling storyline.

'The Tortured' is available on DVD from next Monday.