The Tortured

A great concept but the delivery sucks mostly due to bad writing. Plotholes and the forced lowquality plot twist at the end ruin it.

How is a tax evader transported in a van with a child killer?

How did they not know they had the wrong guy, shouldn't Kozlowski's face be burned in their memory?

How did the wrong guy know the kids name?

How did the dog guy not get suspicious at all?

Overall I like the revenge vibe, I also like how dark the whole movie really is. Still, seems like they really wanted to force it to be as disturbing as posible, even if it means the plot is gonna suck. Could have been a gem.

The movie is not as bad as I expected seeing the reviews. I did not see the twist coming actually, but other than that a quite basic one for a boring weekend night.

Craig and Elise Landry (Jesse Metcalfe and Erika Christensen) have their world torn apart when John Kozlowski (Bill Moseley), a drooling psychopath with deep-seated parent issues and an unrivalled collection of disturbing curios in his basement, abducts and murders their six year old son. When the killer is caught and brought to trial, but only receives a 25 year jail sentence for his heinous crime, the distraught couple decide to take the law into their own hands and exact a far more fitting punishment.

The Tortured is, as the title suggests, yet another in the recent wave of horror films that have (un)popularly been dubbed 'torture porn'; however, rather than try to make the viewer turn away in disgust at gory atrocities inflicted upon innocent victims, as is usually the case with this sub-genre, the intention here is to appeal to the audience's most primal emotions, fulfilling a basic desire for sweet justice by depicting a twisted piece of human garbage on the receiving end of some serious pain and humiliation for a change.

This twist on an already well-worn theme might have worked if it wasn't for an unnecessary and totally unbelievable twist at the end which robs the viewer of any real satisfaction. Add the fact that the violence perpetrated is far from stomach churning (the gore is most unimpressive with the yuckiest scene turning out to be a dream) and the plot requires major suspension of disbelief (for example, one is expected to believe that, after a van has somersaulted off a bridge, sailed through the air, and crashed face-down onto some jagged rocks, those inside have all miraculously survived death), and what you have is a bland and instantly forgettable effort, another nail in the coffin for a horror trend that should have been buried long ago.

It's garbage like this keeps people from seeing GOOD movies like "SAW". The only thing that saved this film for me was the company I was with while watching it. Had I been by myself, I would have turned it off halfway though. Really dumb. Don't waste your time. The only reason it gets 3 stars from me is because the ending actually surprised me a little bit. But not enough to recommend it to anyone. So here it is: A young couple lose their very young son to a killer who kidnaps and seemingly beats him to death. (It doesn't really get into HOW the boy dies.) Anyways, the guy gets caught, and while he is being transported to prison, the van driver gets sick (because the boys parents poisoned him) And pulls off to the side of the road. The boy's dad then jumps in the still running van and takes off to kidnap the killer and get his revenge for killing his son. The guy crashes the van, tossing the killer out onto the road. They pick him up and take him to a special lair where the sad parents proceed to torture the guy for a couple days. The ending WAS a little surprising, which helped a little. But all in all it was a waste of time and a little upsetting that a movie like this can make the good horror movies look so bad.

At the first 25 minutes the movie try desperately, with a series of crude flashbacks, to convince the audience of something the actors themselves could not: To believe that they are suffering for the lost of their child. And even that isn't enough to make believable an apple-pie family turning the new Hewitts. An unbelievably long hour later the film was over with a very confusing but mildly interesting 5 minutes ending. One moment you are wondering "how that will turn out?", the other, roll credits. Through out the whole movie, flashbacks continue to appear over and over and over again showing nothing relevant to the plot or the characters psychology. The torture parts are also not terrible enough to please the "Painjunkies" out there, which makes sense if an upper-middle class family would perform it, but the characters most of the time make it looks like its not a big deal to do that to a person. The script is very poorly directed. Even for a TV Series Director. It takes too long to begin, and not long enough to finish. Climax of the story happens in 5 minutes. If the movie was turned into a 15 minutes episode of "Tales from the Crypt", it would be nice enough. But surely not far a movie. To the fans of Twisted Pictures, I advice you to wait for the Next Saw.