Torment

I love these real obscure independent drama thrillers with some bite, a cast of unknowns, and one hell of a twist involving family relation. That said, Torment is quite a nifty and well made film, the standout performance, that of the middle aged psycho, who's been slaughtering a few women in the burbs of San Francisco. Our female lead has her share of torment in this film, one, from our very ill of mind psycho, and the other, from an old nagging, over cautious, and mad woman, the mother of her soon to be wedded husband, with a sort of Art Garfunkel hairdo. He's also the lead cop on this serial case. Although Torment is far from perfect, I really liked it for it's high originality. Altogether something different, and stand apart, with very promising cult status, and works very conveniently as a thriller, the pre climax, highly suspenseful, if annoying too. Warranted viewing. How much torment can you take? Just watch our lead, the sufferer.

TORMENT was one of those videos that sat gathering dust at the local video store, so I decided to pick it up one day and give it a look. In all honesty, the film is good for the one surprising twist halfway through the meandering story, but does one twist a movie make? Not really. The film is low-low budget, and the small cast and limited situations are reflective of that. The cast does just enough to get the story told and that's about it. But do you watch a film like this to be blown away? Nope. The directors do throw in a few interesting touches, such as the interesting opening sequence of the murderer's car going down the highway, and the cranky old woman in the wheelchair who winds up being something of the hero sort. Other than that, if you want to skip on by, start the walking.

A recently engaged woman's weekend with her soon-to-be-mother-in-law gets crashed by a deranged psycho who's set his sights on them.

Torment is an obviously low budget offering without any major star power and technical pizazz to help it through some the duller moments of the film, but a midpoint twist is a real shocker and a lot of the scares and jolts are very effective. Still worth seeing once.

As is the case with a lot of movies, there were some really good and inventive ideas for the plot and in the hands of a better writer/director and cast, this could have been a great movie. It is still better than a lot of the dross produced in the 80's, just needed more polishing.

"Torment" follows a young bride-to-be who spends the weekend with her paranoid soon-to-be-mother-in-law at her sprawling San Francisco estate. Meanwhile, a psychotic woman-killer has arrived in the city, and is about to descend on their weekend plans.

This flick was released by New World Pictures in the late '80s and seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle, toiling away on video store shelves before vanishing into the abyss. Like most New World Titles, "Torment" is not high art, but it is a fairly clever psychothriller which has some things in common with the '70s giallo. The entire film really looks more like a '70s picture than it does an '80s one; everything from the score to the gritty cinematography gives the impression that you are watching a film made in the mid-1970s. There are a few homages to Hitchcock peppered in, and a number of great visuals that counteract the low budget.

There is a fair amount of suspense established early on before the film throws its singular curveball at the midway point, which is an unusual and crafty one. The last half suffers after this revelation to some degree, as there isn't much left in the way of surprises, but fortunately a spunky performance from Eve Brenner as the protective, wheelchair-bound mother-in-law really amps things up. William Witt, an unknown, plays the schlubby killer, while Taylor Gilbert is serviceable as the clueless protagonist.

Though not a terribly exciting film, "Torment" is a crafty thriller that manages to succeed in more ways than one. It is worth viewing for fans of psychothrillers, and manages to establish itself as a late-'80s curio that feels more like a mid-'70s English-language giallo. 7/10.