Gag

The burglars Tony (Vince Marinelli) and Detroit (Scott W. Mckinlay) break in a house to heist the content of a safe. They find a man, Brian (Brian Kolodziej), tied to a mattress with a gag near the safe and they believe he is participating of a kinky sexual game. When they are attacked by a stranger, Wade (Gerald Emerick), Detroit is tied to a chair and Tony is cuffed. However, Tony escapes and releases Detroit and Brian, who claims that Wade has captured his sister Stacy (Amy Wehrell). Tony dominates Wade and when he finds Stacy, he discovers the truth about her brother and the sadistic torturer.

"Gag" is another cheap rip-off of the franchise "Saw" – actually another sick and implausible festival of tortures… and nothing else. The plot and the characters are poorly developed, the situations and reactions of the characters are implausible and the main preoccupation of the director Scott W. Mckinlay and writer Kirk Sever is to show the most twisted tortures of the sadistic and deranged killer in the most graphic way. I confess that I am tired of this genre, repeated again and again in "Saw", "Captivity", "The Cellar Door", "Broken", "Sporkill" and other movies like "Gag". I suggest the writers that gave ten, nine, eight and seven respectively to this flick in their comments in IMDb to stop writing fake reviews or seek psychological help because something is seriously wrong with their evaluation of a good movie. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Torturados" ("Tortured")

It's rare that a film can offend you morally by sheer ineptitude alone. A movie wherein the act of watching somehow assumes an aura of ethical lapse is a rare and regrettable event. Spending two hours of your time watching "Gag" is an offense against nature. Time is far too valuable a commodity to spend any of it watching this sadistic, amateur, exploitative, unoriginal, clueless, poorly acted, ugly, cheap, offensive, nonsensical, and altogether boring film. And I like horror movies! Made without a modicum of either technical proficiency nor thematic clarity, Gag simply exists as a series of poorly executed, prurient torture scenarios loosely strung together by a ludicrous plot that steadfastly refuses to make sense. Almost atavistic in it's terribleness, Gag is impressively without one iota of taste or style...the total lapse of judgment by the filmmakers is a sort of negative genius. Saddest of all is that this terrible, disgusting story with it's crude and vile images is what these filmmakers thought would make an artistic statement. This is what they have to offer the world. Mean, ugly, and without redemption, Gag lacks any of the charming camp value that usually accompanies the worst of films. Marrying an utter lack of joy with the basest of imaginations and utter dearth of narrative understating, Gag's only redeeming feature is its title: it's utterly apropos.

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.

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.

Let me tell you, I have seen a lot of ShittyAss Movies in my day, but this one takes the F*cking cake. This whole movie is just a huge pot of A**. From beginning to end credits the whole movie is just bullshit. The plot is absolutely atrocious. The acting is just balls. Seriously, I wish I could meet the creators of this movie, and kick them in the nuts because I want my hour and 5 minutes back. Again, this whole movie is just horrible. For the love of God stay away from this movie, for I wish I had a time machine so that I could go back, and stop myself from ever renting this movie. If you receive this as a gift from someone, immediately set their house on fire, because they, for some reason, wish to cause you unbelievable, and unchangeable pain.

There really isn't anything good about this movie. The special effects F*cking suck. Really, they do. The cuts in between scenes are just horrible, and I have seen home movies that are directed better.

The plot is just the s*it topping on the already steaming pile of nothing that this film is. Without giving too much away for you, two burglars break into some guys house to allegedly find a safe. There, they find some bodies, and are then taken hostage.

This is one of the main parts that just pisses me off. A guy gets handcuffed with those metal toy handcuffs you buy at a toy store. You can see the F*cking release switch, and he gets cuffed to a pole that is about a quarter inch thick. Any A**hole with half a brain, even in an indie horror flick, could get out of that.

Then, it gets worse.

There is a complete 10 minute scene in which the main character is chased around this strange house, completely blindfolded.

Seriously, What the F*ck.

I can understand villains in horror movies being stupid, but he is outsmarted by someone who is handcuffed, blind, and in a house he has never been in before. Then to top it all off, he locks himself in a bathroom with a swinging door.

I'm not going to spoil anything, all of this can be seen on the DVD itself, and I should have known, but what the F*ck. I can't believe that I actually paid money to view this.

Do yourself a huge favor, and for the love of God stay as far away from gag as humanly possible.