A Tortura

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")

Aspiring actress Ginette (amazingly hot Russian stunner Elena Bouryka) attends an audition with underground director Alex Scerba (Simone Corrente), who wastes no time in getting his lovely young performer to strip for him. While on stage (on all fours, in her undies), Ginette discovers an earring identical to one worn by her friend Marzia, who has been missing for several days. After a one-night stand with Alex, Ginette accompanies the luck S.O.B. on a visit to his studio where she meets his mother, who is barking mad; while there, she finds a second matching earring on the ground. Suspecting that Alex has something to do with Marzia's disappearance, Ginette breaks into the house after dark to investigate. Meanwhile, a gloved maniac is auditioning three sexy babes for a special one-night-only performance—as the stars of a snuff video!

The Torturer sees director Lamberto Bava cashing in on the success of gruelling gore-fests like Saw and Hostel, presenting 100 minutes of insanely hot women being stripped and mutilated at the hands of a sadistic maniac; before the opening credits have even finished, a whimpering victim has had her breast impaled on a hook and her leg roasted with a blowtorch, and the nastiness continues throughout, with other deviant delights on display including electrocution, flogging, and a nasty instance of nipple mutilation. It's exploitative, misogynistic trash devoid of artistic merit or anything resembling a decent plot, with characters who behave in an extremely illogical manner; but while no means a great film, it's far from Bava's worst (if you want to know the true meaning of torture, try a triple-bill of Devouring Waves, Graveyard Disturbance and The Ogre!). The director at least delivers what the title promises: lots and lots of mean-spirited violence. The fact that all of the victims are female, drop dead gorgeous and mostly naked is just the icing on the whole sleazy cake.

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.

Like most of his Italian contemporaries Lamberto Bava's career as a feature film director more or less ran into the ground by the end of the 80's. The money in the Italian industry moved into the television environment and subsequently most of the film-makers who had worked in cinema started making stuff for the small screen. Bava was no different and seems to have operated in TV oblivion since those days. So it was good to see that he had stepped back into making cinematic output in 2005 with this film, The Torturer.

Having just seen it, it seems quite obvious that the level of production value available to Italian genre film-makers had dropped dramatically over the intervening years and consequently this comes across as a very cheap movie indeed. It follows the trend of the day in that it is a torture flick that revels in sadistic violence in a similar way to the American big hitters Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005). I don't particularly have any objection to this, nor do I mind that it is shamelessly derivative. Copycat movies can often be a lot of fun and sometimes more of the same is kind of what you want. What was an issue here though was the sheer cheapness of the production and the general resultant ropiness that comes along with this. The story-line is half-hearted to say the least and isn't really worth restating. The plot-line is really no more than an excuse to show half-naked women being tortured and terrorised. It sounds quite sleazy and it is really but its alleviated a lot by its general low quality presentation. The dubbing is atrocious, more like the level of a 70's chopsocky production that an Italian film, while there is more or less a complete absence of style not helped by the whole thing seeming to have been shot on digital video. So what we have is ultimately a pretty unpretentious and straightforward bit of horror trash. It's difficult to recommend this one too much on account of its significant deficiencies. It's not in the same league as Bava's better work clearly but it was still good to see him at least make a newer horror film even if it's a not very good one.

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.