Brilliant and touching

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

With the October Horror Challenge taking place on the IMDb Horror board,I decided to take a look at film maker Lamberto Bava's IMDb page,where I discovered that Bava had made a torturer horror which appears to have not come out on non-Italian DVD.Talking to a DVD seller,I was pleased to discover that he had recently tracked down the movie,which led to me getting ready to face the torture.The plot:Auditioning for the latest film from underground director Alex Scerba, aspiring actress Ginette Cazonni is taken by Scerba's charms,and ends up having a one night stand with him.Getting set to leave his place, Ginette finds an ear ring which looks just like the ones that her missing friend Marzia Foster used to wear.Fearing that something has happened to Foster, Cazonni starts to investigate and discovers that before she disappeared,Foster had auditioned for Scerba.Breaking into Scerba's house, Cazonni soon finds Foster and makes a torturous discovery.View on the film:Stabbing the torturer horror set pieces,co-writer/(along with Diego Cestino/Luciano Martino/Dardano Sacchetti/Michele Massimo Tarantini & Andrea Valentini) director Lamberto Bava and cinematographer Ugo Menegatti drizzles the sequence in stylish silver which allow for the blood to burst across the screen.Stepping out of the torture chamber,Bava clouds Ginette (played by a cute Elena Bouryka,who also appears naked) in moody low-lighting,which thanks to shooting the film on grainy digital,gives the title an unexpectedly icy Gothic atmosphere.Displaying a desire to stray away from the torture horror foundations,the writers attempt to give the film a Giallo bite in the search for the missing Foster,which sadly dries up due to the title having to go back to the gore.Whilst they are unable to torture the Giallo,the writers give the terror a sly satirical edge,as each of the actresses sees the gory acts as the demands of a "sadistic" director,as the torturer gets tortured.

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.

This is only the fourth effort from Bava Jr. that I've watched – not counting the co-directing credit on his father Mario's last film, THE VENUS OF ILLE (1978); the others were BLASTFIGHTER (1984), DEMONS (1985) and DELIRIUM (1987). I hadn't been impressed thus far, and this latter-day giallo with the current (regrettable) torture-porn mentality certainly didn't improve his lot – if anything, it further sank his chances of ever hoping to equal his old man's influential achievements! Being shot on Digital, the film displays no style whatsoever and looks ugly into the bargain; as for the plot, it's strictly by-the-numbers fare and, therefore, wholly uninvolving. A handsome young man is revealed to have had a disturbed childhood – cue an excruciatingly annoying and recurring ditty – so that we're led to believe that he's the titular figure (especially since the victims are aspiring actresses who had just been auditioning for the would-be boy genius). Then comes the admittedly stunning heroine – who's really there to probe into the fate of a friend who's gone missing but, lo and behold, she instantly falls for the hero. Also involved is his domineering father-in-law/agent and mother (a Daria Nicolodi wannabe) who's all-too-obviously crackers.Needless to say, Bava Jr. lazily opts to pile up, and linger on, the gore (and nudity) rather than – pardon the pun – pump new blood into the exceedingly tired situations. As I said, the revelation – of both the reason behind our hero's torments and the villain's identity – provides no surprise at all, nor the fact that the heroine is rescued (by her lover's mother, who suddenly regains her senses!) in the nick-of-time from a fate worse than death. For what it's worth, I have a bunch of other titles by Lamberto on hand – namely GRAVEYARD DISTURBANCE (1987), UNTIL DEATH (1987), THE PRINCE OF TERROR (1988) and THE OGRE (1988) – which I may or may not get to in time for this Halloween challenge

After 14 (!) years of hanging around quietly on TV-sets and directing things unknown to the masses, Lamberto Bava finally shows some signs of life again by returning to familiar horror-territory. Yay! Only... it's damn sad to see it's only an unimaginative twitch and a pathetic attempt to ride the successful wave of torture-horror à la SAW and HOSTEL and the recent outbreak of fake-snuff related horror-flicks.Cinematographically speaking, Lamberto Bava sure tries to do his best with the very low budget this movie had. Seemingly shot on video, the movie shows us examples of original and even captivating framing (like the one shot were you see a dead girl's body laying in the mud on the foreground when Elena Bouryka is pulling electrical wires out of the ground in the background) and Bava also used a lot of contemporary editing-tricks to make it all look a bit more modern and slick. The lighting wasn't bad at all, really, but the few daylight scenes looked awful.Now as far as the story goes: It's retarded. They might have gotten away with a "plot" like this during the 70's, but having to sit through something like this these days, simply is an insult. The women are all such stupid and dumb characters you just want to hit them in the head with a blunt object yourself and get it over with. They're just too dumb to realize what they are getting themselves into, while any person with at least the braincells of a frog would realize that they should get themselves out of the situation they have gotten themselves mixed up in. I really scratched my head numerous times.The scriptwriters (including Bava) didn't even try on this one. They tried to disguise this torture-movie as some sort of Nu-Giallo movie, but they failed to insert any kind of red herring and you just know right away who's doing the killing. It can be only one person, really. And then there's this totally pointless and ridiculous sub-plot about 'traumatized mommy' babbling nonsense and a kiddies song with the lyrics "this door stays locked" (or something like that). It doesn't even lead to anything. And what about a hero who saves his girl, then walks by a female victim who's still alive and tied to a cross, simply ignores her, leaves her in pain, walks outside the building, closes the door, holds his girl and says "I'm glad it's all over now"??? I think "OMG" would be slightly appropriate... And what about the previous scene where our hero pulls his girl out of the water after she had drowned like 30 minutes ago... and then after 5 minutes of violin-music she opens her eyes again...??? Come on, please... I rolled my eyes on that one.I have to admit Elena Bouryka is quite pleasing on the eyes as the leading lady... even for a skinny blonde bimbo, ehrr... I mean: Lady. And she can even act a bit... but only when she does NOT speak and looks scared or is investigating things. Seriously, her high-pitched, squeaky (dubbed, probably...?) voice had me convinced she was born in the wrong era. She should have been an actress back when they were still making silent movies... Well, yeah, I'm being a bit harsh on the lady probably. She's still young and I'd like to hear her talk once with her real voice (preferably with a sexy Italian accent), instead of this dubbed one. The dubbing was quite good in this film, actually. But really, it should be in this day and age.So were the several gruesome and bloody make-up effects. Good and numerous enough to please any gore-hound or torture-fan. And that brings us to the only point this movie has to make: coming up with as many inventive ways to torture attractive women to death and try to get them all to take their clothes off in front of the camera. And that's all this movie is about. It's pretty sick, yes. It has a lot of beautiful women showing skin, yes. I even liked it for that. But it's a very bad film, children.