There's budget, as in doing a lot with no money and making a virtue of that, and then there's budget as in reaching high and failing thanks to an obvious lack of cash. With more resources, this could have been a serviceable, if lazy 'Hostel' rip-off. As it is, it's at times hilariously poor and otherwise downright dull.
The first thing that really alerts you to the level we're at here is the accent work from the main henchman - a couple of minutes in and were treated to a full Dick van Dyke number from John Dallesandro. I'm not sure why the (Irish) director decided this criminal family absolutely had to be British, but checking the actor's agent page he does have Cockney *and* "Victorian English" listed, whatever the latter might mean, so he's obviously confident in his own abilities. Perhaps there's a decent actor hiding behind these tortured vowels but it's impossible to tell from this performance.
The budget issues show with the sets. We're shown several of the audience members for these darkweb torture shows, supposedly millionaires, none of whom live in anything more impressive than a suburban townhouse. Look out for some more fun accent work from these guys, though - you can pass time waiting for the plot to advance by guessing where they're supposed to be from.
Most of the acting is fine, nothing spectacular but given what they're working with, it's hard to be overly critical. The negatives are mostly directorial or writing decisions, from odd scripting (perhaps there was something behind the decision to have the leader of the brutal murder gang call his father Daddy, I couldn't work it out though) to plot devices that seem to be thrown in to fix plot holes, each one making several more in the process. We see police involvement once, hinting at some larger conspiracy behind this horror, but that angle gets forgotten just as quickly in favour of pointless flashbacks to the abductee's night out. The police are paid off to not investigate missing women, but governments, banks and press don't bother looking into it? The technical processes involved in the broadcasts are managed by an abductee, who apparently can't access the wider web to get help because they've "limited what he can access" - they have the know-how to outfox him on that, but not actually manage the broadcast system themselves? There's a lot more but you get the idea.
In the end, the film nearly allows itself to become truly sickening - which wouldn't have particularly improved it but would at least have made it notable - but shies away from that in an apparent, incredibly presumptuous preparation for a sequel. Four years on and I think we're safe, but there is absolutely nothing to recommend this dire shock by numbers. Torture porn is a fairly dismal genre but the better examples at least try to provoke something beyond revulsion - admittedly, it's almost always an exploitation of the fear of the other, from 'Cannibal Holocaust' to the Hostel series, but this doesn't even seem interested in playing on the fear of walking home alone, or the attitudes of the rich to the lives of the poor - watching 'Red Room' and reflecting on this is a bit like watching a team you have no feelings about miss an open goal in a game you're not invested in. If you really need to see another scene in which women are tortured to death, have at it, but there are films that do that and also retain a coherent plot, so you'd have a better time watching one of those instead.
5 out of 7 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
