The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Torture Porn was a term coined in 2005 after the success of films like Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) to refer to a fad for films featuring scenes of Sadism and Torture pushed to an extreme.
Both Saw and Hostel spawned sequels and a brief fad for imitators. In these, a group of people were imprisoned and usually forced to undergo cruelties or make brutal life and death decisions, resulting in their torture and deaths. The selling point of the film would be these tortures shown in grisly detail.
A blatant copy of Hostel wherein a trio of students cross the Mexican border and fall prey to a Santeria cult. Despite its derivativeness in the plot department, this emerges as a brutal and fairly well made film
Highly effective British venture into the Torture Porn fad made not long after the successes of Saw and Hostel. A brutal and harrowing tale about women kept prisoner in the woods that travels to some grim and gore-drenched extremes
Tedious psycho film that only seems slung together to feature a series of nasty dispatches. Features some incredibly bad writing and maybe one of the most ridiculous pieces of serial killer motivation ever devised
Disappointing sequel to the Torture Porn film The Collector. The captivating premise of an ordinary house turned into a series of deadly traps is gone, while the sadistic, gore-drenched set-pieces are tame and unimaginative
A directorial debut from one of the writers of the Saw sequels, this is a Torture Porn film that has a highly unusual set-up about a burglar stumbling into a family home that has been turned into a death trap by a serial killer
Rob Zombie’s sequel to House of 1000 Corpses and altogether a far more polished film, probably Zombie’s best. On the other hand, Zombie’s nihilistic worldview and sympathy for the psychopaths does take one aback.
A film about a couple who break down on a country road and seek help at a sinister farmhouse, before everything turns into Torture Porn territory. And then things get weird
Mario Van Peebles directs a beyond ridiculous getaway thriller that turns into Torture Porn. Cybill Shepherd gives a performance that seems determined to trash her image
The film that put the term Torture Porn on the map. Eli Roth determines to push boundaries with one of the most brutal films ever seen in mainstream release in the tale of tourists made prisoners at an East European hostel for paying clients to torture
Eli Roth’s sequel to his earlier hit, this emerges as a pallid copy of its predecessor, having merely changed the sexes of the protagonists and lacking the original’s gut-churning impact
Third in the Hostel series, an indifferent piece of formula hackwork minus Eli Roth where suspension of disbelief is constantly being disrupted by absurdly contrived scenes
Rob Zombie’s debut film was propelled into an infamy it didn’t deserve it was banned by its distributor. Zombie only slavishly rehashes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with a constant posturing for shock effect that becomes tiresome
Widely ridiculed psycho-thriller starring Lindsay Lohan at the height of her tabloid headline phase and giving a zero effort performance as twins. Quite what is going on in the confused screenplay is anybody’s guess
The harrowing 1970s raped woman on a revenge spree film is given the remake treatment, although is watered down in many key areas. The revenge scenes however are played up for a particular nastiness
One of the most brutal and harrowing films in recent memory. The most notorious among a late 00s wave that was nicknamed French Extremism, it concerns a pregnant woman pursued through her own home by a mystery woman determined to tear the baby from her womb. The climax alone is almost impossible to watch
The Saw series went from a brilliantly torturous original to an emphasis on increasingly unpleasant torture excesses. Whether we asked for it or not, this is a revival – the upside is that unlike the other sequels it comes from a duo of directors who have made some quite good films elsewhere
A film made not long after the advent of the Torture Porn fad in which a group of friends are imprisoned on a farm to be broken and sold into slavery
Pascal Laugier makes one of the most horrific films to emerge from France in the 00s. Scenes of grim torture sit alongside a plot that twists like a pretzel and messes with almost everything we take for granted
Martyrs was one of the most grimly disturbing films of the 2000s; this English-language remake, which waters everything down and rewrites the ending to have one of the girls bursting in to save the other with a shotgun counts as surely one of the great all-time cinematic bad ideas
This has almost nothing in common with the 1980 film it is supposedly based on. Instead we get a home invasion film where Darren Lynn Bousman of Saw sequel fame shows that constant scenes of brutality and torture are all that he has in his arsenal
Forget the grim and sadistic sequels that followed, this low-budget directorial debut from James Wan is a masterwork that conjures unbearable dread and tension in its study of characters forced to consider the horribly inconceivable
The first sequel to the sleeper success of Saw where Darren Lynn Bousman inherits the director’s chair but delivers a film that lacks the torturous suspense that James Wan gave the original
Third of the Saw films and the point where director Darren Lynn Bousman places the series’ focus on grim gore-drenched sadism and torture
Supposedly the final chapter of the Saw saga – where the sole novelty on offer is gore and body parts coming out the screen in 3D. This is conducted with a tired lack of effort that makes for tedium-inducing watching
Fourth of the Saw films, the third under Darren Lynn Bousman who has placed an increasing emphasis on torturous extremes at the expense of credible plotting
Fifth of the Saw films. By now the series has developed such a complicated backstory it is difficult following how it all pieces together
Sixth time around and the backstory is starting to become so excessively complicated it is hard to follow what is going on. All the gruesome torturings now seem passe, although this does redeem itself somewhat in making a few black digs at the medical health industry
The Saw series is back and this has been getting some of the best reviews of any entries in the series
Uwe Boll ventures into Torture Porn territory with this tale of a brutish serial killer returned from the electric chair
Not to be confused with the Stephen King story collection, this is about a film crew shooting a film in an abandoned asylum about murders conducted there who discover a trove of snuff movies whereupon the director becomes obsessed with recreating them
The Saw series is revived sort of, featuring the activities of a Jigsaw copycat, otherwise this offers up all the familiar essentials in all but name
A Found Footage film where a group on a party weekend to Las Vegas call a brothel that promises to do anything – only to enter into full Hostel territory
Rob Zombie featuring people abducted and forced to play in a deathsport game. This is largely a re-run of House of 1000 Corpses, while both films in turn draw heavily on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. As always, Rob Zombie has a following but also switches large swathes of his audience off
Rob Zombie is back,, making the third in his trilogy of Firefly films following House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects. It is all fairly much the same as before where Zombie’s sympathies are cleanly with the family of psychopaths and their murderous rampage.
By the numbers Backwoods Brutality where a woman is imprisoned by crazed backwoods fundamentalists in order to bear them a child
A couple abduct and torture a paedophile who killed their son. Hard to tell if this is an edgy out-there film or the most tasteless concept that Torture Porn cinema has tried so far. Alas, a banal tv movie handling kills any possibility of the former
A blatant copy of Hostel featuring tourists caught aboard a train in Ukraine that runs an organ-harvesting operation
A blatant copy of Hostel about tourists in Brazil being abducted into an organ harvesting scheme. Director John Stockwell seems distracted by filming diving scenes
A Found Footage film that gets political – in this case, featuring a group of American vigilantes torturing Mexican illegal immigrants. Not quite full on Torture Porn but holds a darkly barbed bite
Making dubious claim to be based on real-life, this courted considerable controversy with its violence. Essentially an Australian Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Greg McLean readily pushes things to extremes
Greg McLean and John Jarratt return to the Australian Backwood Brutality saga of Wolf Creek for a second outing that is just as effective as the first. McLean often pushes the material into black humour and creates at least one sequence that makes for genuinely uncomfortable watching