Torture

I seriously don't intend to waste further time or too many words on the review for "Gag", because it's - simply put - a terribly bad and amateurish horror effort! We get it, Mr. Director, you watched "Saw" and you assumed you could do better? Since the birth and the tremendous success of the so-called "torture porn" sub-genre, many aspiring yet sadly untalented directors come up with their own idea for a sick and revolting torture tale. Most of these attempts are bad, but this "Gag" is beyond abysmal and doesn't feature one single positive aspect or redeeming quality. No wait, there is something good about this film, and that's its length! It lasted less than 80 minutes and I was grateful for that. Otherwise we're talking dire settings, lousy editing and lighting, excruciatingly painful acting performances and gratuitously cruel but unimaginative torturing methods & death sequences. "Gag" is so lame that it reuses the same dire plot-twist (if you can even call it that) twice, namely that a victim is mistaken for the culprit. Yawn! Do not watch, unless you are into self-torture.

This movie wasn't bad enough to be funny. It was just incredibly painful to watch. But, it did hit the trifecta: 1) The actors CAN'T act to save their souls. 2) The script is just miserably awful. 3) The directing is just sad. Let's start with the set up for the film, two professional burglars break into a house and finding a guy tied up in a basement. The guy tied-up has obviously been beaten and/or tortured and may be dead. One of the burglars wants to leave thinking the guy tied might be dead, the other one refuses to leave until he has cracked open the safe and gotten the money that may be inside. WTF!!! If the police show, we all know who they'd blame. But, there's moron insisting they stay to get the money first and risk lethal injection. The movie goes downhill from there. The characters become infinitely more lame. The story goes from inane to irritating. And the pathetic script, combined with the inadequacies of the actors and director drag this movie down further. (Yes, it's possible for this movie to get worse). I'm convinced the high marks and lauding this movie is receiving is from people who are closely associated with the making of this film, or they are close friends of the people involved. Because this movie just sucked.

Another one of those horror movies that I got solely due to the cover artwork. My mistake. Although some of the acting could be deemed less than extremely pathetic, the directing was not. He has absolutely no idea how to create a suspenseful atmosphere. Granted, the script from Kirk Sever didn't give him much to work with, but there were still times where it was obvious he didn't maximize the suspense. I wasn't scared once. I was however left wondering, "Kirk Sever wants his sister to do what to him...?" It tried to use shock value to create a horror movie, but we've seen Saw, Faces of Death, Hostel, etc. You're gonna have to take it a lot farther than that. Otherwise it'll just look lame, as it did. Overall it looked like a decent high school project. Nowhere near anything worthy of being on a Blockbuster shelf. If you like horror movies, even if you like bad horror movies, do not watch this. The only way you could justify watching this garbage is if you're an up and coming horror director/writer and you want to see what not to do.

I pretty much watch all horror movies voraciously, and I LIKE my torture porn - right along with my psychological thrillers and good, old-fashioned slasher/monster flicks. With the recent lines of Saw and Hostel setting the bar for outrageous gore effects fairly high, I'm not surprised to see the lower budget movies struggling to keep up with the trend. Gag does use what budget it has effectively enough in its gore shots. They didn't skimp on the blood, and while some of the stunts were ridiculous, I'm not entirely sure they weren't intended to be.

It's a watchable film, but it drags. The writing and delivery of lines were often amateurish, which made the dialogue difficult to sit through at times. Had the death and torture sequences been more outrageous, it could have been truly shocking. Had they been a little more ridiculous, it could have been horrifyingly funny. Had they hired a different script writer, it might even have been clever. The end result is a sloppy movie that lacks commitment to be anything other than another low-budget fright flick with lofty ambitions and no follow-through. Worth a rental for genre fans, certainly, but not really worth a movie theater ticket - even at the matinée price. I'm not surprised it didn't get a general release.

For those of you who thought that Captivity would be the movie to officially end the torture-porn trend, you were probably right, but just to seal the deal, here's Gag. Gag is an atrocious horror flick which feels more like a gay S&M porno gone wrong than a horror movie. Three men are forced to swallow various objects when they're not gagged or getting f-ed with spears. To me that sounds like the description of a bad gay porno, not to mention the porn-sounding title. Anyway, before I head into this review, I would like to say that I'm very tired from a long days work so this review probably won't be as thorough as I'd like it to be.

Gag tells the story of two professional thieves who break into a seemingly empty house, only to find a man brutally beaten and tied to a bed. Blah, blah, blah, Saw-like twist, blah, blah, blah, torture, blah, blah, incest, blah, blah, you get the idea. Gag is a no-budget Saw rip-off and it's even a shame to call it a Saw rip-off as these guys obviously didn't get what the first Saw movie was all about. It wasn't about torture, it wasn't about S&M, it was about the psychological horror (something which has gone lost in the Saw sequels) - a quality that Gag doesn't have.

Gag may want to be disturbing but it's not, and the "inventive" torture scenes are either ridiculous or down right impossible. A mouse would never crawl down a tube and then eat away at someone's mouth. And sure, getting burnt with boiled pennies may hurt, but to me it just seems like some extreme kind of hazing, not necessarily torture (plus it was very silly to look at). Then we have the fact that the movie both looks and feels homemade. The director obviously doesn't have a clue about what he's doing behind the camera, and the "actors" are even less secure about what they're doing. Hell, it doesn't even seem like these people wanted to be in the movie. Were they really THAT desperate for a pay check? Or perhaps they thought that this would be the next Saw. If so, they can't have been very smart.

It's not the worst movie of the year though and it is watchable if you're into this kind of thing. To me, this is more porn than anything. Remove the gore and add some nudity and you've got yourself a hardcore porn flick (unfortunately not a very good one at that). I won't recommend it but I'm sure there are some people out there who enjoy this kind of thing. I'm just more into movies that actually have a story. In the end, Gag is like an extreme version of Saw, only with a lower budget and with less of a story.