CarlB1961
Joined Sep 2005
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CarlB1961's rating
Terrible low-budget shot-on-video horror movies fall into three distinct categories: so bad it's good; so bad it makes you want to tear your own eyes out to remove the vileness forever imprinted upon your retinas; and so bad it makes you want to tear the eyes out of the unscrupulous sobs who made and released this godless monstrosity upon the world. Sean MacArthur's opus "Experiments In Torture" falls safely into that third category.
The title is all too apt in that "Experiments In Torture" is indeed an experiment in torture; the only ones who should watch this abomination are blind people, terror suspects, and people who feel the need to atone for some sin they committed in the past.
A bunch of vapid, slutty, amoral strippers (as opposed to "virtuous strippers", I guess) agree to be a part of some mysterious rich guy's fetish film and head out to his remote lakeside cabin for the weekend to make some quick cash. Little do they know they're actually being set-up by three sadistic killers who are in actuality making a snuff-film...I think. I don't really know, this thing is such a muddy, jumbled, poorly shot mess I might have missed a "plot-point" (for lack of a better term) or two along the way, but I think that's pretty close. The only ones who can save them are the hot-headed, overprotective brother of one of the strippers, the bouncer of the nightclub where they work, and some random guy who has some unexplained foreknowledge of the killers. Naturally, one of the three is in cahoots with the killers and things don't go too smoothly for our heroes, leaving the job of saving the day up to another stripper who had previously escaped the psychos after they killed her friend and she threw acid in the face of one (for some reason she didn't tell the police and ended up in a loony bin instead, or maybe she did tell the cops and they didn't believe her and that's why she's in the loony bin).
There is not a single redeeming feature in this truly Godawful excuse for a film. The lighting is so terrible that most of the time you cannot even tell what's going on. The sound is atrocious, the make-up effects impoverished, the story ridiculous, the acting... nonexistent. Never, ever EVER in ten+ years of watching low-budget movies horror and otherwise have I seen such terrible, terrible acting. There is not a single professional actor--or even a remotely talented amateur--to be found in this dreg. The strippers are such a vacuous bunch of unlikeable airheads I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out they were really just a bunch of strippers the production crew hired to be in the film (but unfortunately weren't paid enough to do what they do professionally (get naked) on screen). No "stripper with a heart of gold" here; they'll all just a bunch of skanks and whores. Characterization? Physical features are about all there is in terms of personality.
Things happen without any explanation of any kind. It feels like entire scenes are missing or were just never filmed because they ran out of time or money or both.
I'm all for independent cinema; compared to most of the mainstream crap that comes out of Hollywood it's a welcome departure and sometimes can be genuinely entertaining and tell a good story. The invention of the digital camera in the 1990's opened a new door to an entire generation of wannabe filmmakers. Unbareable crap like this, which is all too common, is the downside of that. For every diamond in the rough, there's just a bunch of cat turds. For every truly talented young filmmaker, there is a Sean MacArthur, who apparently dropped out of the Burger King school of Film-making and then decided to made "Experiments In Torture" one day because they shut off his cable and he was out of macaroni & cheese and his mom wouldn't loan him two hundred bucks to pay his light bill and because, darn it, there just wasn't anything else to do that day!
The title is all too apt in that "Experiments In Torture" is indeed an experiment in torture; the only ones who should watch this abomination are blind people, terror suspects, and people who feel the need to atone for some sin they committed in the past.
A bunch of vapid, slutty, amoral strippers (as opposed to "virtuous strippers", I guess) agree to be a part of some mysterious rich guy's fetish film and head out to his remote lakeside cabin for the weekend to make some quick cash. Little do they know they're actually being set-up by three sadistic killers who are in actuality making a snuff-film...I think. I don't really know, this thing is such a muddy, jumbled, poorly shot mess I might have missed a "plot-point" (for lack of a better term) or two along the way, but I think that's pretty close. The only ones who can save them are the hot-headed, overprotective brother of one of the strippers, the bouncer of the nightclub where they work, and some random guy who has some unexplained foreknowledge of the killers. Naturally, one of the three is in cahoots with the killers and things don't go too smoothly for our heroes, leaving the job of saving the day up to another stripper who had previously escaped the psychos after they killed her friend and she threw acid in the face of one (for some reason she didn't tell the police and ended up in a loony bin instead, or maybe she did tell the cops and they didn't believe her and that's why she's in the loony bin).
There is not a single redeeming feature in this truly Godawful excuse for a film. The lighting is so terrible that most of the time you cannot even tell what's going on. The sound is atrocious, the make-up effects impoverished, the story ridiculous, the acting... nonexistent. Never, ever EVER in ten+ years of watching low-budget movies horror and otherwise have I seen such terrible, terrible acting. There is not a single professional actor--or even a remotely talented amateur--to be found in this dreg. The strippers are such a vacuous bunch of unlikeable airheads I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out they were really just a bunch of strippers the production crew hired to be in the film (but unfortunately weren't paid enough to do what they do professionally (get naked) on screen). No "stripper with a heart of gold" here; they'll all just a bunch of skanks and whores. Characterization? Physical features are about all there is in terms of personality.
Things happen without any explanation of any kind. It feels like entire scenes are missing or were just never filmed because they ran out of time or money or both.
I'm all for independent cinema; compared to most of the mainstream crap that comes out of Hollywood it's a welcome departure and sometimes can be genuinely entertaining and tell a good story. The invention of the digital camera in the 1990's opened a new door to an entire generation of wannabe filmmakers. Unbareable crap like this, which is all too common, is the downside of that. For every diamond in the rough, there's just a bunch of cat turds. For every truly talented young filmmaker, there is a Sean MacArthur, who apparently dropped out of the Burger King school of Film-making and then decided to made "Experiments In Torture" one day because they shut off his cable and he was out of macaroni & cheese and his mom wouldn't loan him two hundred bucks to pay his light bill and because, darn it, there just wasn't anything else to do that day!
