Are you looking for an intriguing story, originality, crackling dialogue, great characters, cleverness, and/or tension? Then GO AWAY! I'm sure there's an audience for La Petite Mort, namely hardcore gore-hounds, but man oh man, a little effort could be made in other areas creatively. To the writer/director's credit, he openly admits his sole focus was to create as-gruesome-as-possible special effects, and everything else kind of falls by the wayside. Also, goes so far to say he primarily makes "torture porn," straight-up. Of which this movie absolutely qualifies.
Ok, I'll point out the good first. The setting. Perfect setting for (most of) a grimy, disgusting torture porn flick, where, well, insert key plot of Hostel right about here. The primary three characters are traveling for vacation, get sidetracked in Frankfurt, Germany, where they inexplicably stumble into a dank and filthy REAL German (presumably) fetish sex club/dungeon (cue entire bar to stop what they're doing to stare at their newly-arrived guests). Also, they roped goremeister Olaf Ittenbach in to handle special effects. So, they are effectively graphic, disgusting, and OTT. Let me tell you, have a gander at the 50-minute behind the scenes extra. Not only am I always surprised how light the atmosphere is on a production like this is, but I have to give kudos to the male "victim"/actor (Andreas Pape) who gets his eye gouged out, amongst other things. On a no-budget ($5000) German gore flick, I wouldn't go anywhere near that knife to the eye gag. None of it! Just to hazard a guess, this actor got between $100 and NOTHING for his performance in the film. The knife effects, along with the gushes of blood, look uncomfortable, AND scary as s#!t! Admittedly, the results are spectacular in the completed film. I dunno, the daughters of the owner show up in hot fetish outfits? That's all I got.
Ugh, alright, what remains is literally nothing. Right away, this dialogue took me right out of the movie. There's maybe a 20-minute set-up, and it doesn't get any better when baddie Madame Fabienne (Manoush), shows up to, er, chew the scenery? This movie does deliver on perverse, depraved graphic violence, but I generally like a little more meat on the bone, so to speak. An interesting character with half his face burned off (Thomas Kercmar) appears as a paying customer, but I was a bit sidelined by how on-the-nose this sequence was to Hostel.
The final 10 minutes (well, that includes credits) really threw me for a loop. First of all, how anyone could live through the positively brutal torture doled out is completely unrealistic, but on top of that, seemingly solely for plot contrivances' sake, an up-til-then unforeseen GUN is introduced! It all felt tacked on, and filmed at a later date. Like, by the time they had forgotten they actually killed off the final tourist.
Ah, the prologue... I'd be remiss if I didn't bring this up. From the tired book of horror tropes, La Petite Mort purports to be based on a true story, AND names have been changed to protect the innocent. Of course this information is followed by characters subjected to pure exploitation and graphic bloodshed. Like, why bother?
