The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Sadism and Torture is the infliction of pain, suffering and cruelty on another person and the enjoyment of doing so. The sexual enjoyment of administering and receiving such between consenting parties is discussed under BDSM.
Sadism and Torture is frequently the province of Psychos and Serial Killers. Those held captive in Imprisonment Thrillers are also frequently subject to such. 1970s exploitation films detailing the historic Witch Persecutions and the Women in Prison genre became notorious for depicting catalogues of cruelties inflicted on victims.
The Backwoods Brutality cycle was known for pushing depictions of sadism and torture to extremes, showing backwoods dwellers and hillbillies taking great delight in inflicting a range of savageries upon innocent city dwellers.
One of the greatest extremes in recent years has been the so-called Torture Porn cycle of the 2000s and the French Extremism of the same period, featuring a series of films that pushed on-screen depictions of sadism to heretofore unknown levels.
This was the third of the notorious Ilsa films featuring a hyper-sexed Dyanne Thorne. This locates everything in Russian where she is the commandant torturing the prisoners of a Soviet gulag
Larry Buchanan is a director on a par with Edward D. Wood Jr. This, not to be confused with the 1974 killer baby film, is his best film. Buchanan creates a perverse obsessiveness that is fascinating to watch
Animated film that is gore-drenched and certainly not for children. Imagine The Belko Experiment conceived as a videogame where the heroine has to survive an office of people trying to kill her while aliens bet on the outcome
The Saw series is back and this has been getting some of the best reviews of any entries in the series
Not to be confused with the Stephen King story collection, this is about a film crew shooting a film in an abandoned asylum about murders conducted there who discover a trove of snuff movies whereupon the director becomes obsessed with recreating them
Serial killer thriller that eventually emerges as I Spit on Your Grave reimagined as a police procedural. Much effort is made to portray a grim urban environment but little to engage as a thriller, although Selma Blair owns the show as the avenged woman in the latter third
80s outrage rocker Dee Snider writes and stars in this horror film where he plays a freakish serial killer who is demonised by parents
Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story gets full marks for being set during the Spanish Inquisition. On the other hand, Gordon’s unserious splatter heavy approach and a campy performance from Lance Henriksen deflates the material
An anthology of horror tales from Indonesia, most being too short to make much distinction,, the exception being The Mo Brothers gore-drenched first film Dara
A Backwoods Brutality entry from the increasingly underrated Adam Mason where the entire film has been shot in a single take. Often brutal but much of the film seems monotonous with indulgent improvised performances allowed to dominate the show
Uwe Boll ventures into Torture Porn territory with this tale of a brutish serial killer who returns from the electric chair on a trail of vengeance against his condemners
Fifth of the Saw films. By now the series has developed such a complicated backstory it is difficult following how it all pieces together
Sixth time around and the backstory is starting to become so excessively complicated it is hard to follow what is going on. All the gruesome torturings now seem passe, although this does redeem itself somewhat in making a few black digs at the medical health industry
By the numbers Backwoods Brutality where a woman is imprisoned by crazed backwoods fundamentalists in order to bear them a child
Third of the Saw films and the point where director Darren Lynn Bousman places the series’ focus on grim gore-drenched sadism and torture
Gregory Hoblit has proven a fine director but this film about a site showing murders live on the internet feels like an hysterical rant about the dangers of the internet masquerading as a thriller
The first sequel to the sleeper success of Saw where Darren Lynn Bousman inherits the director’s chair but delivers a film that lacks the torturous suspense that James Wan gave the original
This starts as a standard Japanese high school drama but takes a turn for the twisted where it doesn’t exactly venture into Saw territory but certainly somewhere that has taken inspiration from it. Alas, everything gets lost in a second half that is burdened by an excessively complicated and non-linear plot
The Saw series is revived sort of, featuring the activities of a Jigsaw copycat, otherwise this offers up all the familiar essentials in all but name
A blatant copy of Hostel featuring tourists caught aboard a train in Ukraine that runs an organ-harvesting operation
Rob Zombie is back,, making the third in his trilogy of Firefly films following House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects. It is all fairly much the same as before where Zombie’s sympathies are cleanly with the family of psychopaths and their murderous rampage.
Brazil’s Jose Mojica Marins became a cult figure for his Coffin Joe films; this is an anthology sold under the Coffin Joe banner. Without the Coffin Joe presence, all we have is a series of not very well directed pieces that linger on perversity, although the final segment does stand out memorably
Eli Roth home invasion thriller where two malicious girls turn family man Keanu Reeves’ life upside down. Roth creates a strong opening but hits the peak of the film not too far in and thereafter loses direction
The fifth Hellraiser sequel and the only one among the last four worth watching. It brings back Ashley Laurence but abandons the Cenobites for a fascinating series of reality bending games
Eli Roth’s sequel to his earlier hit, this emerges as a pallid copy of its predecessor, having merely changed the sexes of the protagonists and lacking the original’s gut-churning impact
This was debatably the first of three films that came out around the same time with the same title. Here a group find themselves in an escape room facing nasty deaths in each room
Horror film from the rising name of Anthony DiBlasi set around an extreme haunt, a Halloween horror show that pushes everything beyond people’s limits
The big screen remake of the popular 70s/80s tv series about an island that makes guests fantasies come true. In the hands of Blumhouse, this has now been turned into a horror film
From the director of Cannibal Holocaust, Ruggero Deodato, comes this home invasion thriller that rips off The Last House on the Left. This was listed as a Video Nasty back in the day
Rob Zombie’s debut film was propelled into an infamy it didn’t deserve it was banned by its distributor. Zombie only slavishly rehashes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with a constant posturing for shock effect that becomes tiresome
Amid the 2010s spate of multi-director horror anthologies a la The ABCs of Death, V/H/S etc, this is a trio of tales from all German directors, the most well known of which is Jörg Buttgereit of Nekromantik infamy
A compilation of short horror films from Denmark
Whether we asked for it or not, this is a revival of the Saw series. The upside is that unlike the other sequels it comes from a duo of directors who have made some quite good films elsewhere
The ninth of the
The ninth Hellraiser sequel. Most of the others are a far call from Clive Barker’s original. This demonstrates that all hope is not lost in a wild and imaginative opening sequence
Fourth of the Hellraiser films. This attempts to tell a story set in three different eras but was subject to much studio interference that waters the vision down to something forgettable
One of the notorious 1970s Nazisploitation films, this Italian-made entry is one work that crosses way over taboo lines and makes for extreme watching
A directorial outing from the screenwriters of A Quiet Place produced by Eli Roth set around a Halloween haunt. This avoids the pitfall of other Halloween haunt films and creates some effective games of reality and illusion
Mel Gibson wants to give us a film that shows Jesus’s suffering leading up to the Crucifixion but has taken it to such an extreme that he has actually created a Torture Porn film that gives the Saw and Hostel franchises a run for their money
The 2007 Inside in which a pregnant mother is pursued by a woman with a pair of scissors was one of the most brutal viewing experiences amid the French Extremism fad. This is the English-language remake
Film based on true-life serial killing couple Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. This could have been another Monster but it feels like a film that played everything safe in terms of its content
A valiant attempt to remake Clive Barker’s glistening and brilliant original that only emerges as a better made version of one of the sequels. This has a disappointing tameness that would never have inspired a series of sequels
Not a Marquis de Sade adaptation as this was sold as but an Italian giallo film. Mickey Hargitay (aka Mr Jayne Mansfield) has a ball as a mad bodybuilder aristocrat in red tights devising entertainingly lurid tortures.
Film about a big overweight psycho who abducts girls and makes them enact a fantasy of being a cheerleader. Produced by one of the directors of The Blair Witch Project
A giallo film with Anthony Steffen as an aristocrat who likes to pick up red-haired girls and kill them in the dungeon in his villa, who then becomes haunted by the ghost of his late wife
The first two of these films did ingenious things but now the inspiration is showing through and these films are starting to seem more like a personal fantasy on the director’s part
Lars von Trier made this deeply unfathomable film after a bout of severe depression. Claimedly a work of misogyny, it features Willem Dafoe trying to deal with a deranged Charlotte Gainsbourg
Made not long after the success of The Witchfinder General, a film based on the notorious historical figure of Judge Jeffreys. In the hands of exploitation director Jess Franco, the historical account is sidetracked by sado-sexual scenes
A biopic of the Marquis de Sade that is not uninteresting but suffers from being produced by Roger Corman on one of his usual B-budgets
An anthology of three Stephen King stories, this comes out with extremely variable results where what were originally a series of tight and mordant tales end up strangely overblown
This seeks to be another Se7en, adapting a script by Se7en writer Andrew Kevin Walker and employing the same visual style in the story of Nicolas Cage delving into a seedy underworld in search of a snuff movie.
A directorial debut from one of the writers of the Saw sequels, a Torture Porn film that has a highly unusual set-up about a burglar stumbling into a family home that has been turned into a death trap by a serial killer
Unfriended gained attention as a horror film that took place across social media where the computer screen became the video screen. It was done first in The Den about a snuff internet site that stalks people who innocently log in
A blatant copy of Saw, albeit without the Torture Porn sadism, with people imprisoned in a cellar forced to kill one another. An oddly unconvincing film that fails to generate any tension or even conviction
A disappointing remake of the harrowing Wes Craven classic where the violence has been tamed down and the film is entirely missing the irony of the original’s savage ending
A work of exploitation notoriety about snuff movies. Seen in heavily cut and edited forms, the film holds an undeniably sordid and nasty charge but mostly comes across as amateurish
Spanish home invasion thriller that comes with a moderate degree of brutality and tension but ultimately feels more like a set of choices in a survival horror videogame than an engaging thriller
The Hellraiser sequels begin their descent to mediocrity. Clive Barker’s original vision of dark, forbidden pleasures has been watered down and the Cenobites become little more than campy variations on Freddy Krueger
The old party game about choosing between two difficult decisions is spun out into a rather lame attempt to make another Saw. Given a generic commercial handling, the film fails to get inside the psychological tension of its life and death decisions
A film made not long after the advent of the Torture Porn fad in which a group of friends are imprisoned on a farm to be broken and sold into slavery
A film about three American girls who are haunted by a vengeful child spirit while in Thailand. Another post-Insidious film that uses a sinister adjective as title
A film about a snuff site that broadcasts a torture gameshow live on the web. This is a thriller that feels as though made by people who know nothing about the internet or law enforcement procedure
This has almost nothing in common with the 1980 film it is supposedly based on. Instead we get a home invasion film where Darren Lynn Bousman of Saw sequel fame shows that constant scenes of brutality and torture are all that he has in his arsenal
Actor Wings Hauser directs and stars in a film in which he plays a detective pursuing a killer who is luring teenage runaways into making snuff films
A variant on Buried, which had Ryan Reynolds trapped in a coffin for the duration, featuring a girl trapped in an elevator as it conducts high-speed rises and drops, all before a bizarre left field SF ending
I’m tempted to make a comment about this being a film that offers its own critical summary in its title but this Saw wannabe is so tame it fails even that. Hard to believe a film with a premise about a group of people forced to torture one another could emerge so dramatically uninteresting
Blatant Saw copy from Roland Joffe, a director better known for his arthouse works, from a script by cult director Larry Cohen. This starts stylishly before collapsing in a series of ridiculous twists
A man is abducted by a stranger who proceeds to remove his limbs in an effort to make him remember the terrible crime he committed. This suggests an incredibly grim film. Surprisingly enough, it is a comedy
From Troma films, this is an anthology made up of twelve Christmas-themed short horror films for what supposed leading indie directors – so acclaimed I’ve only heard of two of them before
Disappointing sequel to the Torture Porn film The Collector. The captivating premise of an ordinary house turned into a series of deadly traps is gone, while the sadistic, gore-drenched set-pieces are tame and unimaginative
A couple abduct and torture a paedophile who killed their son. Hard to tell if this is an edgy out-there film or the most tasteless concept that Torture Porn cinema has tried so far. Alas, a banal tv movie handling kills any possibility of the former
Mario Van Peebles directs a beyond ridiculous getaway thriller that turns into Torture Porn. Cybill Shepherd gives a performance that seems determined to trash her image
The third of the Texas Chainsaw films where the rights have now been inherited by New Line Cinema and the brutality of the original promptly watered down to MPAA standards
Eli Roth’s remake of the classic Charles Bronson vigilante film is an ugly affair. In an era where school shooting are a weekly scourge in the US, do we really need another fantasy about one man becoming empowered and sorting things out with a gun?
Fourth of the Saw films, the third under Darren Lynn Bousman who has placed an increasing emphasis on torturous extremes at the expense of credible plotting
Third in the Hostel series, an indifferent piece of formula hackwork minus Eli Roth where suspension of disbelief is constantly being disrupted by absurdly contrived scenes
Internet horror film that rehashes Ring with a haunted website instead of a tv broadcast. This suffers from a muddled concept where it is not at all clear what is happening.
A film about a couple who break down on a country road and seek help at a sinister farmhouse, before everything turns into Torture Porn territory. And then things get weird
A few years ago, Neil Marshall seemed a major genre director on the rise with The Descent. Here he returns with a film about the historic witch persecutions
A Texas Chainsaw sequel in 3D with chainsaws and gore coming out at the screen seems the complete antithesis of the raw savagery of the original. The result is like a formulaic modern slasher, while the film is wrecked by a ridiculous reversal of sympathies in the last half
Supposedly the final chapter of the Saw saga – where the sole novelty on offer is gore and body parts coming out the screen in 3D. This is conducted with a tired lack of effort that makes for tedium-inducing watching
One of the most tasteless films ever made, a sado-sexual work set in a Nazi concentration camp with Dyanne Thorne as a sadistic commandant torturing and having sex with prisoners.
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman makes a film set at a convent for unwed mothers in the 1950s. Is there any chance this might be a work about institutional cruelty or the plight of unwed mothers in the era? Hardly, all it really is is Bousman inflicting a series of tortures on the girls
This was made following the success of Hostel, a low-budget film concerning a group of girls abandoned at a deserted Mexican resort town that may be haunted
A hardcore and irredeemably nasty film, this has the aesthetic of a snuff movie and features lots of scenes of victims tortured and vomiting
A psycho film about a serial killing photographer that stalks Las Vegas, this collapses under its determination to be edgy
Arguably the world’s first Found Footage film, this gained a notoriety by conducting a scam that tried to sell it as a real snuff movie
Maybe one of the great exploitation titles of all time quickly telescopes down to a near-unwatchable film from Andy Milligan. A Victorian-set werewolf film with rats thrown in to capitalise on the success of Willard
Martyrs was one of the most grimly disturbing films of the 2000s; this English-language remake, which waters everything down and rewrites the ending to have one of the girls bursting in to save the other with a shotgun counts as surely one of the great all-time cinematic bad ideas
Film that gained a notoriety for its scenes of a stage magician torturing and mutilating people. This seems fueled by a nasty misogyny involving the degradation and killing of women.