Talk about a guilty pleasure.
Cartoonishly evil frat guys lure a few women to a remote cabin for a party, only to drug them, rape them, and release them to hunt them down for sport. Things don’t do as planned, though, when one of them reaches a road and flags down a car… which happens to have an incredibly realistically nerdy couple—I could swear I sat next to these two in the computer center in college—who turn out to, uh, not be people you want to fuck with.
What follows is tough to categorize. Torture porn? Revenge fantasy? The darkest pitch-black comedy I’ve ever seen? It’s basically all of these.
It helps that it has some good moments that redeem it, so you know it isn’t just an exploitation flick. The stereotypically weak characters—the female intended victims, and the geeks—turn out to be overpoweringly strong, but with a humorous insouciance throughout, like they’ve all done this before (and, uh, there’s a reason for that…) Opposing characters are left alone together to give some scenes of drama and a break from the violence, but it’s pulled off in an unforced way that worked for me. Also, while it’s very violent, it doesn’t relish the gore, and it’s so bloody that you may not notice that all the actual injuring of people occurs just out of view of the camera, pretty much never in-from. You see blood but you pretty consistently never see the knife go in, although it’s shot and edited well enough that you might not notice you didn’t. I find that strangely thoughtful. It’s an odd contradiction of a movie, thought about that way. And that makes it less a bad movie than a spoof of one, which, well, Popehat’s Law Of Goats applies. (Google it.) But I’m aware of the distinction, and so, it seems, were the filmmakers, throughout this.
Don’t get me wrong. I said this is a torture porn, and a revenge fantasy, and it is. And it’s full of characters that are leering one-dimensional stereotypes, barely more than cardboard cutouts of familiar “types”… while the stereotypically weak characters are give depth and strength, the bad guys are just cartoons, absolutely no character depth or subtlety at all, as a revenge fantasy films seem to often call for, and then some. But… it’s different, and definitely could be considered a very guilty pleasure just because of how confidently it breaks convention. So, while I can’t recommend it, I did like it, and could see watching it again at some point for sure.
This deserves more than the 3.9 stars it has on IMDB, but admittedly, I understand it, because it’s cartoonish, a b-grade spoof with some a-grade novelty to it, instead of a real horror movie, and doesn’t sit comfortably in any genre. Basically it’s a movie that’s not going to please anybody. Except me, and even then only with strong reservations, a guilty entertainment at absolute best.