Can't Argue With The Title

It will likely not surprise you to hear that I found a low budget internet horror movie on Amazon, that it looked terrible, was under 80 minutes, and therefore, I dove in. 

I'm a predictable person.

Quick Plot: Zane settles in for a quiet night in his off-campus apartment, laptop on, tissue box in easy reach and his favorite website fully paid for: Beat a Slut.Net. 

Sigh.

His roommate seems a little better adjusted. Josh says goodnight to his girlfriend and comes home to discover Zane's computer on but no sign of Zane. He catches a glimpse of Zane's last web visit and is instantly transported to a Hostel-ish cell. A silent, scarred man appears, controlling Josh's motions as he's forced to torture his very own roommate. 

Josh wakes up in his own apartment, dismissing the moment as a bad dream but lured back to Zane's computer to watch a woman beaten and strangled for clicks. Back he goes to the bloody room, where the violence towards Zane escalates under the mournful eyes of the same woman who just lost her life on Zane's screen. 

Flashbacks throughout lend a little more insight into Zane and Josh's friendship. Pals since summer camp, they headed to college with big ambitions of not repeating their high school misery. Josh found a way: hosting obnoxious parties with live bands and copious amounts of molly. The more socially awkward Zane couldn't find his footing, preferring the company of snuff film and death metal. Josh knew Zane had questionable taste in porn, and his failure to confront the whole moral quandary of it all has now led to his own eternal punishment. 

Don't Click began as a short film by writer/director G-Hey Kim and it clearly needed a few more script revisions before its full-length (well, 76 minute) extension. The pacing between Zane's torture and his shallow backstory is awkward in a way that doesn't build any real tension. The idea of a closed door incel getting his comeuppance is fine, but there's simply not enough development of Zane to make us feel ANYTHING when he's being brutally tortured by the body of his best friend.

On the other hand, Josh (played by Valter Skarsgård, and yes, there's yet another Skarsgård) comes across a bit more solid, but no less ill-defined. The movie is either harshly judging a young adult for not harshly judging his friend's taste in porn (rude), or doing a very poor job of suggesting Josh knew these women were really being murdered on camera. 

Where does that leave us? With a poorly told story, or worse, an incredibly muddy condemnation of pornography. In 2024. 

Yes, I will think very differently of a person if I discover their website of choice is called BeatMySlut.net. But also, porn exists to let people partake in fantasies that they often WOULD NOT in real life. Punishing someone for what they do for themselves without actually involving others is pretty puritanical. 

Sure, in the case of Don't Click, it's clear (because this is a horror movie that involves vengeful router ghosts) that this website is a real hunting ground. And this vengeful router ghost is fully in her right to sew a participant's mouth shut and make his best friend chop off his masturbating hand. I'm all for that in theory! But Don't Click is so muddled in its morality that I feel weird rooting for, well, ANYTHING here. If you can't make me want to watch an incel get tortured, maybe you're doing something wrong with your storytelling. 

High Points

I'm a simple woman, and the supernatural explanation of "a murder victim's blood running down a WiFi modem creates a website ghost" made me unreasonably happy in the dumbest of ways 

Low Points

I obviously had a lot of problems with Don't Click, but if I had to boil it down to one, I'd say it's the extreme fuzziness of its own morality. Not every horror film needs a code, but when you're so zealous about both SHOWING torture and judging those watching the torture, it just feels like a lot of anger with no direction

Lessons Learned

Sorry to disappoint, but most college freshmen are not going to be impressed by your original Man Bites Dog poster

Always have a non-verbal code with your bestie

A thick side bang will not protect you from blood modem ghosts

Rent/Bury/Buy

I don't know what anyone will get out of Don't Click. It's certainly better made than some of the more recent low budget duds I've watched of late, but it's hard to find anything here that adds up to a recommendation. As is often the case, if you choose to ignore my advice on not watching a low budget torture porn-inspired horror movie, you'll find it streaming on Amazon Prime. 

The Hunt (said with Australian accent)

I suppose it has something to do with being the only 5-year-old at the movie theater watching The Running Man, but the hunting humans subgenre of action horror has just always packed a lot of appeal. Even the worse ones--and golly, Amazon Prime has some very low-priced duds--offer a little more automatic intrigue over a basic slasher or Saw trap-themed gorefest.

Onward today with the unimaginatively titled The Hunt! 

No, not that one.

Wait: did this 2009 movie get retitled on Amazon Prime with the same title as a marginally successful mainstream film in order to scoop a few viewers who might watch the entire thing without realizing their mistake? 

Genius.

Quick Plot: On the last Friday of every month, a group of loosely connected wealthy frenemies take part in the titular hunt, wherein they kidnap a batch of strangers and, well, kill them. The "hunt" part seems a bit like false advertising, as once the subjects are (easily) captured, the killers mostly just tie them up and torture them in their various styles until they're done.

The twist at this particular iteration of the game is that the soon-to-be-victims are loosely connected as classmates of "The Inquisitor", a former huntee who survived her game and now gets to play with the rest. On the menu are a sleazeball named Ricky, rich snob Sarah, deaf runner Ariel, her goth sister Callie, and Callie's computer expert buddy Chris.

The killers aren't that much more interesting. There's the big bad: a boring rich man. His daughter is a marginally more watchable martial arts expert. There's also a mysterious "sniper", cruel hacker, and sadistic ex-military guy trying to channel his inner Mick Taylor. 

Surprised? 

Written and directed by Jon Cohen, The Hunt (or The 7th Hunt, depending on where you see it) isn't terrible. It's just kind of nothing. You can't expect more from a low budget horror that came out of the grimy ashes of the post-Saw era wildfires. It would just have been nice to have found something. 

High Points

As you expect in this kind of story, one of the targets is a rich blond snob, but surprisingly, she ends up making for the most sympathetic victim. If only we had more of her

Low Points

Most of the running time

Lessons Learned

When trying to escape from a violent man, the best exit is to run straight into his chest

Finger count doesn't correlate with ball size

Lunacy pays well

Rent/Bury/Buy

Eh, The Hunt is far from the worst thing to come out of that ugly 2009 era of torture-y horror, but boy, remember how rough that era was? 

Tooth, Nail, & Torture

 Remember that post-Saw era of straight-to-what-we-used-to-call-DVDs horror, where titles were one homophone and cover art usually included teeth? 

Found another one!

Quick Plot: After a pre-credit sequence involving a man being skinned alive on a doctor's table, we move on to the tried and true "attractive college students wearing unreasonable clothing while camping" sequence to establish our hot young leads: Nice guy Nick and his secretly pregnant girlfriend Tayler, and slightly wilder Kai and her straight-laced boyfriend Tony. 

While stopping for gas, they meet Diane (Passions' Sheridan Crane/Face/Off host McKenzie Westmore), a lady on the town who needs a lift to her own car parked in the middle of nowhere because obviously, that's the ideal spot to gas a truckload of young people and lock them in a Saw 2-style grunge-filled home.

The group awakens alongside a few other confused souls, all with devices installed in the back of their heads and a large monitor and 22 hour countdown clock in full view. A video tape of a mysterious scientist plays informing them of their new purpose: raise their hormone levels sufficiently for their captors to collect their juices (just go with it) and they'll all be released. The best way of hitting those levels? TORTURE.

(Well, actually, as the Jeff Spicoli-ish lone wolf points out, they could all just have sex, but that would put this in a different genre, so forget we even brought it up.)

After a few false starts, the group agrees to rotate torture duty, trusting that when they hit their marks, the doors will open and they'll limp back home, a few fingers short but fully intact to live the rest of their lives.

These people are idiots.

Vile is credited as being directed by Taylor Sheridan, the now-successful writer behind Sicario and Hell or High Water, though his Wikipedia page tries to downplay any involvement. As first films go, Vile isn't terrible, though keep in mind, I'm saying this as someone who's seen just about every Saw-inspired gross-out flick to come out of the early aughts. Next to, say, Nine Dead, how can ANYTHING be bad?

But also, Vile is not very good. Part of it is the sheer datedness and stupidity of its concept: torture porn was a term that was often misused by mainstream critics, but Vile is LITERALLY about torture, and in a supremely dumb way at that. When a character is madly scrambling through kitchen drawers so that she can plug in a wafflemaker and burn her own back, there's really no other description that fits. 

All the soulful indie rock tunes used to montage sequences of a bound hot person screaming while his or her friends look on in tears can't cover the fact that, you know, this isn't cool or scary...it's just pretty stupid. 

High Points

As much as the young and pretty cast leaves little impression, I did appreciate the earnest effort to make it clear that the moral compasses of each person varied wildly, and that Nick was pleasantly consistent in his sense of right and wrong

Low Points

I don't always mind not getting answers in a genre film, but the half-story of Vile's watchers is so muddled that it's just genuinely unsatisfying to learn some, not all the answers we might have wanted. 

Lessons Learned
Even amongst college women, there is a fair amount of confusion over the definition of feminist

When your clock to a violent death is audibly clicking, you should definitely take all the time in the world to artistically determine the order of who gets tortured first

It ain't real torture until the fingernails come off

Rent/Bury/Buy

No, Vile is not particularly good, but it's better assembled than many a similar film of its era and subgenre. Those of you weirdo completists who feel the need to see every somewhat professionally made horror film of the last 20 years can find it on Amazon Prime. 

All Aboard, If You Have Nothing Better to Do

Some nights, you just really want to sit back, drink some wine, and watch what I predict will be a lousy Dead Pretty Teenagers Who Might Deserve Some of Their Fates direct-to-whatever-was-not-theaters at the time of its early 2000s release horror movie.

Unfortunately, this was one of those nights. 

Quick Plot: An American college wrestling team is touring eastern Europe. Four of the students and their assistant coach decide to party their last night in Russia, leading to them missing their morning train to Odessa and pissing off their pretty awful coach. A helpful English-speaking blond directs them to a Ukraine-bound train she's boarding, and before my cat can cough up a hairball that looks like Eli Roth, it's organ reaping time.

Remember those early post-Saw years in horror? Though I genuinely enjoy and often defend that franchise, I'm also the first to admit that its success bred some terribly ill-spirited, uninspired movies that hated humanity...especially the female kind.

Train apparently began life as a remake of Terror Train, but decided along the way that it would rather be Hostel with a spoonful of Turistas.

But also, with more would-be rapists urinating on a man about to be castrated.

Did I mention the POV is from the soon-to-be castrated dude, which means yes, writer/director Gideon Raff gives us a piss shot.

I added Train to my Amazon Prime queue after seeing the description as "horror on a train from Russia to Ukraine". As someone who's made that train trip twice and knows the terror of those cramped corners and floor toilets, I welcomed a change of setting. I wasn't expecting Shakespeare or, I don't know, something perfectly average, but I don't know that it's ever fun to watch something as outright ugly as Train.

Thora Birch makes a decent final girl, but also one devoid of any sense of fun before the slaying starts. As you'd expect, every victim is an ugly American without any charm and in some cases, with plenty of obnoxious attitude. There are a lot of chains. Not, like, Chain Letter-levels of chain quantities, but still: lots of chains. The gore is gooey and admittedly well executed, but of course, it's all done under that typical 2000s style of literal and figurative darkness. 

This movie hates the world. 

High Points
I was getting incredibly frustrated with the whole idea of a movie making its cast wrestlers only to have them so easily picked off by some very unhealthy looking organ harvesters, but at least the film remembered in its final fight

Low Points
Oh I don't know, probably the fact that after I groaned about a fairly graphic attempted rape, we go a few minutes before another young female character is carried off screaming by a group of lusty soldiers and that's the last we see of her

Lessons Learned
The trick to blending in when in Ukraine? A babushka

Chekhov's Law of Nipple Rings In Torture Porn tells us that if you introduce nipple rings in the first act, you must use use them as tools of extreme pain in the fifth

Eye transplants take less than 24 hours for the subject to be fully active sighted

I didn't realize anybody needed to hear this, much less a premed college student, but don't like, just GIVE your passport to anyone who asks, especially if said anyone has been making rape eyes at you all day

Rent/Bury/Buy
Blargh. I knew what I was getting into from the opening credits, wherein we just got a lot of closeups of oozing body parts, but still: Train is mean, the perfect representation of how unpleasant early 2000s horror was. If you're seeking that reminder, head to Amazon Prime. 

Note To Self: Next Time, Just Rewatch Swimfan

Sometimes, running length is all it takes to sell a movie.

Now onto the 75 minute long (thankfully) The Tortured.

Quick Plot: Elise and Craig Landry are a successful suburban couple with a cute little six-year-old son named Benjamin. Before you can roll a credit, Benjamin is grabbed in broad daylight right out of his backyard by a twisted child killer.

Naturally, such an awful event does all but destroy Elise (Swimfan Forever Erika Christensen) and Craig (Passions Forever Jesse Metcalfe). Things don't improve when Benjamin's body turns up in the nightmare house of John Kozlowski (genre veteran Bill Moseley). Though Kozlowski is found guilty, the mere 25 year prison sentence does little to ease the Landrys' pain.

What follows is a typically miserable revenge plan that's fairly unpleasant for all involved. Elise decides prison is no payment for what John has done, convincing a reluctant Craig to help abduct the convicted man from police custody, bring him to an isolated cabin, and torture him for weeks until they feel satisfied. In typical no-that-perfectly-thought-out-characterization, Elise and Craig continuously flip flop positions in deciding they're doing the right or wrong thing.

It's as fun as it sounds, especially when we reach the kind of twist ending that does little but make its main protagonists look like even bigger idiots than we already thought they were.

Directed by Robert Fire In the Sky Lieberman, The Tortured is...well, exactly what you'd expect from a 75 minute movie about torture made by a decent filmmaker. The actors are fine, considering what little they're given to do. Like a lot of this subgenre, the entire film seems to be washed in a greenish blue filter that somehow makes the action even more remote and hard to care about. It's not dreadful by any means. Just...well, pretty blah.

High Points

Credit to a movie that understands there's no need to go on too long when you have rather little to give

Low Points

It's just so hard to accept a gut punch of an ending when there's so little justification for its main characters' mistakes

Lessons Learned

Drugging police officers is about as easy as untying one's shoes

Never store your sunscreen in a junk drawer

"Hush Little Baby" may have a nice lullabye tune, but when you actually listen to the lyrics (which show up at least twice), it's hard to not judge the singer as being a crappy parent whose master plan of raising her child is to spoil it rotten

Rent/Bury/Buy

Eh. The Tortured is a more professional production than a lot of the other torture-porn under the radar flicks you're likely to find on Instant Watch. That doesn't make it actually pleasant to watch in the least, so go on with it only if you just REALLY want another 75 minutes of watching two pretty people turn a body into something very ugly.