Movie Reviews

After Dark Films

Review in a Hurry:  Sexual sadists rejoice! No longer must your fantasies be tethered to the seedy confines of your mother's basement/torture dungeon: The first mainstream soft-core snuff film has hit theaters! For the rest of us, Captivity marks some all-time, depraved and depressing cinema low.

The Bigger Picture:  People go the movies for three reasons: to laugh, to cry or to be frightened. Though with the advent of the torture-porn genre (Saw, Hostel, etc.), there seems to be a new reason: titillation from watching sexual and violent taboos flicker across a giant screen to the cheers of a movie audience. And in the case of Captivity, this comes in the form of watching objects—generally slender and long—forcibly rammed down the throats of pretty young girls as they writhe and cry out, "I'll give you anything you want!"

At the center of this orgy of taboos is Jennifer (Elisha Cuthbert). She's a buxom blond model captured by two brothers whose interest include bathing young ladies in acid, feeding them random body parts...and scrap booking! What follows is not so much of a movie as it is a flip book of atrocities: sadomasochism, cannibalism, pedophilia, incest. These dirty little tidbits fail to shock, or gain any meaning, as they're so poorly done and so completely detached from what there is of a plot.

In between Jennifer's torture sessions—she's forced to drink an eyeball smoothie, watch home movies of her captors having sex with and killing their mother, wear uncomfortably high-heels—a TV set spools interviews with Jennifer, where she explains that there is no "Mr. Right" for her and she isn't interested in dating because most men are losers. 

Upon first glance, these entertainment-news sound bites seem superfluous. But as the movie drags on, this becomes a device used to turn the audience against Jennifer: the beautiful, popular ice-queen, whose magnificent looks and high standards make her scorn well-intentioned men.

The rest plays out as a brutal male revenge fantasy. When Jennifer finally begins to curse out her captors, she's violently punched out—much to the applause of the some enthusiastic audience members. (The chorus of zoo-noises and approving cheers was by far the most horrifying aspect of the movie.)

Captivity is not just exploitive gore-porn—it's bad gore-porn.

Saw at least makes you think: How far would you go to save your own life? Hostel offers small moments of catharsis, when victims break free. Void of cleverness or kitsch, meaning or even morality, what's left of Captivity is an ultraserious, unapologetic study of what buffed, glossed females look like when they are bound, spread-eagle, and forced to cry.

The 180—a Second Opinion:  It sure beats hearing you have cancer.