The Lesson

This was not executed well enough to be a movie.

The plot is basic, but it got convoluted quick with the flashbacks and torture teaching.

If I remember correctly, one of the students tortured was a decent kid.

The violence is poorly executed.

The whole thing dragged and was pointless.

Firstly .. this is torture porn! Its not revernge horror/gore, its about the torture..

Now, the movie itself has its ups and downs .. more downs though. The main story is simple .. but obscured by a totally unnecessary sideplot and relationship drama that adds little to nothing.

With that said, in my opinion .. this movie could have benefitted TREMENDOULY from removing this sideplot entirely .. and cutting runtime to a brief 1 hour .. cause i venture to say that the "joy" of the movie comes from the mainplot alone and not some overcoming of an abusive relationship.

So .. the main plot; taking revenge on students that .. by all means .. seem to "deserve it" .. students with no redeeming quality. So far, so good. The problem i had with this movie is that the teacher just wasnt a very good teacher. (speaking from the perspective of being a teacher myself) He certainly came across as idealistic and enthusiastic .. but not a good teacher.

The students on the other hand came across as just a bit "too rude" .. considering the portrait demographic, such behaviour is VERY hard to imagine .. (although i am not familiar with the english demographic that well, but when i compare it to the nordic education, such student behaviour is simply in the realm of fantasy)

There was a lot of blood .. but not that much gore as most scenes that would "show" gore tended to obscure the actual wounding. So you are left with the acting (not too bad). Actually, i liked the performance of all the main cast .. although not too demanding, i would think .. it was still well done.

I cannot quite recommend this movie, because of the utterly boring sideplot that creates long periods of boredom in the movie .. and the rather unsatisfactory ending.

This was a low budget horror flick with a semi-interesting premise. The movie follows a young student who's not exactly going the right path in life and he and his friends terrorize their teacher. His brother is even worse and the only character you could possibly root for is the girlfriend of the brother but even she is not really a protagonist to root for. The movie takes some time before it gets going and you follow our main character through his struggles in life and him chilling with his questionable friends. After a while the movie devolves into a kidnap-story and a torture porn movie. The gore is okay, the acting is somewhere between decent and bad and the plot bores after some time. It was a decent try but it could have been way better and turned out really forgettable. [4,4/10]

English teacher Mr Gale snaps and take revenge on the wayward yobs that torment him in class. This starts off as a reasonably interesting coming of age drama before suddenly plunging into torture porn. Sadly this is where it all goes downhill for the next hour or so. Yes, there is some gore, but it's certainly no Hostel. The problem is that the film tries to be smart, having the psychotic Mr Gale question his victims on the English dictionary & literature, and what it all means. This just seems to go on for ever & the temptation to hit the FFWD button was great! Could've have been better, certainly has a running time that is way too long. Apparently this British film had a budget of £5,700.000 but looks like one with a couple of noughts less. Disappointing & boring.

I stumbled upon this film by chance and thought i'd watch it out of interest - so had no expectations generated by reviews etc.

It was disappointing from the moment it started. Technically, it was mediocre to say the least. I felt as though no thought had gone into setting up the scenes, the lighting, or the relevance of shots to what was taking place. Someone could have done the same thing with a cheap camera phone - and this was much the same throughout this film. It was as though it had been made to some formula rather than any artistry.

The story could have been a good tale to tell, but was let down by either the script or editing which produced a disjointed feeling between shots, with both over-emphasis and lack of emphasis in certain shots that could have made the film bearable.

In the end I was glad it had finished.