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[ October 29, 2010; ] Lionsgate releases the seventh and allegedly final installment in the popular torture porn franchise – which, they promise, saves the best for last. Tobin Bell is back as Jigsaw, along with Cary Elwes, Costas Mandylor, Betsy Russell, Sean Patrick Flaner, Gina Holden, and Tanedra Howard. Kevin Greutert directs from a screenplay by Marcus Dunstan & [...]

Stapling humans together? That’s just fine. Ruining prom? UNACCEPTABLE!

Thoughts on the “Torture Porn” genre and the reasons for its emergence.

Remaking LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT seemed like a dubious proposition at best; the original was so much a part of its cycnical ’70s era (Nixon, Vietnam, Watergate) that transplanting it to contemporary times seemed as if it could rob the story of vital cultural context. Yet somehow the new HOUSE works much better than expected, perhaps because we had come full circle to a cultural context roughly equivalent to the early ’70s (Bush, Iraq, Torturegate). Consequently, the emake seemed weirdly appropriate – not an anachronisms ripped from its own time and plopped down haphazardly into a new era.

Steven Sheil’s MUM & DAD was shot in seventeen days, on a micro-budget of only £100,000, yet the 2008 release manages to stands up as one of the best British horrors in recent years. How did Sheil pull off this amazing feat? Cinefantastique Online’s British correspondend Deborah Louse Robinson was lucky enough to collar the writer and [...]

Dee Snider’s STRANGELAND 2: DISCIPLE is scheduled for production later this year, some eleven years after the first STRANGELAND was released on DVD. Dee Snider has been fighting the courts to claim back his creative rights over the movie, after the original production company Shooting Gallery had all of its material seized by the government. [...]

Pascal Laugier’s disturbing, brutal, French horror movie is not always comfortable to watch, but in contrast to the other recent torture-porn films, the torture in MARTYRS has a point.
At the beginning we see young girl Lucie escape from a facility where she has been chained to a chair and brutally tortured. Unable to speak of [...]

Recently released on region one DVD, Michael Feifer’s B.T.K. describes itself as ‘a fictional film based on a real character’. That character is the serial killer Dennis L. Rader, who was arrested in March 2005 for the murder of ten people, in a killing spree that spanned two decades. Rader was known as “B.T.K.” because [...]

[ July 31, 2009; ] Freestyle Releasing unleashes this horror-thriller from Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, the screenwriting team behind FEAST and the recent SAW sequels. If nothing else, the premise – a combo of crime-thriller and torture-porn – is certainly intriguing: a thief named Arkin (Josh Stewart) breaks into his employer’s house but finds that the inhabitants have been [...]

James Watkins’ EDEN LAKE won Empire’s Best Horror Award 2009, and was also nominated for their Best British Film Award. The film has some fine, young, British actors performing brilliantly as the threatening teenagers, most notably Jack O’Connell [ring leader Brett], Finn Atkins [Paige] and Thomas Turgoose [whom the London Critics’ Circle awarded their Young [...]

This dismal direct-to-video anthology of nine short subjects is almost guaranteed to provoke howls of outrage from disappointed viewers demanding their money back. The low-budget production values show a certain technical competence, suggesting reasonably well-made student films, but the stories are so flimsy and the pay-offs so weak your reaction is less likely to be [...]

Grim suspense undermined by pathetic plot twists
It might be a bit of an over-reaction to state that this film is all buzz and no blade, but this is definitely a case where “the Phenomenon outweighs The Film.” SAW is a movie of relatively modest (though admittedly undeniable) achievement, but it’s impact was blown out of all [...]

For the masochists among you (and I am barely speaking figuratively), here is a film that surely sets some kind of record for disgusting on screen debauchery: SALO, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM, the final directorial effort from the great Pier Paolo Pasolini. Intended to be read as a caustic commentary on the evils of [...]