The Torturer

The Torturer is an Italian rip-off, knock-off in the torture mainstream movies trend that Saw and Hostel begins. This time, Lamberto Bava (the son of the great Mario Bava and the maker of the amazing gore movie Demons) directs this movie about beautiful babes being tortured by a psycho snuff filmmaker. Thats all about the plot, and, who needs a plot in this kind of movies? nobody. The main problem with The Torturer is that its like a PG-13 movie. Not much blood or gore here, not a lot of nudity or sex. The girls are really beautiful, porn star-looking some of them and models others(the main babe is really beautiful) but this movie is too bland. And thats a shame because Italian cinema uses to make rip-offs with lots of gore and T & A. Not the case here, just an average movie, nothing memorable here.

The twenty-four year-old aspirant actress Ginette Cazonni (Elena Bouryka) goes to an audition with the underground director Alex Scerba (Simone Corrente) and they have one night stand. Ginette finds one earring identical to the one that belongs to her friend Marzia Foster that has been missing for three days on the stage and keeps it with her.

Alex invites Ginette to go to his studio and they go to an isolated house where she meets Alex's deranged mother and his stepfather and producer, but soon Ginette returns home. When she calls Marzia again, she learns that her friend had also gone to an audition with Alex and has never returned home. Ginette suspects that Alex might have abducted her friend and she decides to break in Alex's parental house to investigate and to find Marzia's fate. Meanwhile three other women go to the theater to have an audition with Alex and they are tortured. Will Ginette have the same destiny of the other women?

"The Torturer" is a trash combination of giallo with exploitation by Lamberto Bava with sexy women and torture. The stupid story shows female characters that are dumb sluts and the identity of the torturer is totally predictable. The Russian model Elena Bouryka is very hot and makes the film worthy with her sensuality and erotic scenes. The DVD released in Brazil does not have the original Italian audio and is awfully dubbed in English. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "A Tortura" ("The Torture")

Good old Lamberto Bava - he may not have the film-making talent of his father, but you can always count on him to come up with something sleazy and violent! That's exactly what he's done here, as although The Torturer is pretty crap really, it's graphic and violent enough to please fans of this sort of stuff (people like me, then). In true Italian style, The Torturer would appear to be Lamberto's way of cashing on the successful snuff-themed films of late, which includes the likes of Saw. It would seem that he didn't really have time to come up with a viable plot in his rush to rip these successful films off, and the result is a more than somewhat lacking thriller. The film focuses on a casting director, who gets beautiful but dumb as two short planks girls down to his studio for their auditions. The auditions he gives aren't exactly orthodox, although the girls don't seem to mind much until he starts to brutally torture them! We then focus on one slightly smarter girl who gets wind of what is going on.

The cinematography is glossy, but the film very much feels like it was made for television (except for all the blood and gore). This low quality feel goes on throughout the film, and while this same thing has often gone on to make several seventies films more of a blast; somehow the same just doesn't apply to most modern day films. The torture scenes are fairly good, however, and without doubt the most realistic thing about the film. Most of it feels fairly standard, but there is a sequence involving a nipple piercing that is bound to make some viewers squirm! Lamberto Bava seems to have an eye for the ladies, however, and the film isn't exactly short on buxom women for the slaughter! The actresses auditioned by the casting director are extremely nice to look at, and this bodes well with the ghoulish torture sequences! Most of the film is nothing to write home about (at all), but one thing that stood out for me was the music played while the torture is going on - Bava proves that heavy rock can sometimes be just right! Overall, I can't recommend this film really - but it's not too bad, and it's likely to entertain anyone with a will to track it down.

This is only the fourth effort from Bava Jr. that I've watched – not counting the co-directing credit on his father Mario's last film, THE VENUS OF ILLE (1978); the others were BLASTFIGHTER (1984), DEMONS (1985) and DELIRIUM (1987). I hadn't been impressed thus far, and this latter-day giallo with the current (regrettable) torture-porn mentality certainly didn't improve his lot – if anything, it further sank his chances of ever hoping to equal his old man's influential achievements!

Being shot on Digital, the film displays no style whatsoever and looks ugly into the bargain; as for the plot, it's strictly by-the-numbers fare and, therefore, wholly uninvolving. A handsome young man is revealed to have had a disturbed childhood – cue an excruciatingly annoying and recurring ditty – so that we're led to believe that he's the titular figure (especially since the victims are aspiring actresses who had just been auditioning for the would-be boy genius). Then comes the admittedly stunning heroine – who's really there to probe into the fate of a friend who's gone missing but, lo and behold, she instantly falls for the hero. Also involved is his domineering father-in-law/agent and mother (a Daria Nicolodi wannabe) who's all-too-obviously crackers.

Needless to say, Bava Jr. lazily opts to pile up, and linger on, the gore (and nudity) rather than – pardon the pun – pump new blood into the exceedingly tired situations. As I said, the revelation – of both the reason behind our hero's torments and the villain's identity – provides no surprise at all, nor the fact that the heroine is rescued (by her lover's mother, who suddenly regains her senses!) in the nick-of-time from a fate worse than death. For what it's worth, I have a bunch of other titles by Lamberto on hand – namely GRAVEYARD DISTURBANCE (1987), UNTIL DEATH (1987), THE PRINCE OF TERROR (1988) and THE OGRE (1988) – which I may or may not get to in time for this Halloween challenge

Even though "The Torturer" certainly doesn't qualify as a great horror movie, I would still like to use this opportunity to state: Thank you for doing it again, Mr. Bava! Thank you for demonstrating to us that the Italian horror industry is not yet dead, despite the severe lack of genre outings during the past two decades. Thank you for showing that 'Grand Guignol' make-up effects still exist in Italy and - most of all - thank you for continuing to exploit popular horror themes. During the 70's and 80's, the Italian horror & cult industry became notorious because they gratuitously imitated films that were extremely popular overseas. The Italians blatantly copied the basic story ideas of these films and simply added a whole lot of extra gore and sleaze, which worked just fine for me as well as for many other fans of the genre. Lamberto Bava's "comeback" movie (nearly 15 years after "Body Puzzle") still thrives on the same principle. "The Torturer" cashes in on the contemporary hype of sadistic torture movies, like "Saw" and Eli Roth's "Hostel". The film somewhat neglects logic and story building and puts the emphasis on sadistic and shocking images of mutilation, sexual aggression and purely relentless agony. Bava's venture opens marvelously, with very cruel images of a scarcely dressed and tied-up girl being submitted to vile torture by an unidentifiable person whilst adrenalin-rushing music bursts through the speakers. The faint-hearted as well as people with a weak stomach will already have difficulties enduring this footage and the movie only just started. The actual plot is, understandably, quite skimpy and the events aren't very likely to happen in real life. The gorgeous young actress Ginette auditions for the lead role in the first long feature film of the controversial artist Alex Sherba and she's almost immediately submitted to a long series of harassing questions and indecent proposals. Alex quickly turns out to be a mentally unstable and potentially dangerous man, and when she finds an earring belonging to a missing friend of hers, Ginette even suspects that he might be a killer and starts her very own private investigation. Meanwhile, the torturing of other poor girls cheerfully continues in the dungeon of Alex' parental house. The plot is quite stupid, but it's praiseworthy how Bava tries to implement typical Giallo-elements (like the childhood traumas and the twisted ending) and several scenes DO contain a fair amount of good suspense. Unfortunately, it's a little slow in places and the grand finale is sadly too idiotic and embarrassing for words. Also, the wannabe actresses that end up gruesomely tortured are just a tad bit too naive and dumb to be believable. I don't care how desperately you want to make it in the movie-industry, if your audition is with a perverted guy whom you can't see, talks through a voice-adapter and demands you to assume awkward positions ... you just get the hell out of there. And if you stay, don't be surprised when you end up dead in a spiked chest. They are exceptionally beautiful and sexy, however, and they're definitely not the worst actresses I've ever seen. Especially leading lady Elena Bouryka is truly ravishing and if she stars in a couple of more films, she might even become a good actress.