When a couple of girls go online looking for a party and get chatting to Capt. Howdy (Snider), they get more than they bargained for.
His profile lists Howdy as a college student into R&B, Hip-Hop and snow boarding... Reality has him as a sadistic 'modern savage', who lures people into his basement to 'help' them evolve spiritually through various rights of passage... including tattoos, branding, piercing, scarification, and suspension.
I feel like I'm going to be in a minority here... critics panned this one (on Rotten Tomatoes it currently has a staggering 6% critics rating), but I really enjoyed it.
Yes, it has its faults... Like expecting you to believe that the detective-father of a missing girl would be put in charge of the investigation to find her (and thats only the 2nd most credibility stretching job he gets in the film) , and that modern psychology and drugs can do some outright miraculous things... But come ON, this is a horror movie; usually we're asked to suspend disbelief about zombies, vampires or a whole host of other monsters and we can do that!
Something happens around the halfway point - I won't go into detail - that had me checking the runtime of the film... it's the kind of thing you'd expect to happen at the end; but then it continues with what would usually be the beginning of a sequel. It's an odd approach, but i liked it - rather than rushing the first part into a prologue, or condensing the 2nd part into an overcrowded epilogue (or even worse, stretching 90 mins of story into 2 movies) Snider (Who wrote and co-produced as well as starring) stuck to his guns, and told his story of 2 parts and, although it's unusual, I liked it.
The 2nd half also stars Robert Englund, in a brilliant piece of 'stunt casting' - he pretty much plays a typical (non Freddy) torch-wilding springwood adult.
Because of the 2 part structure though, there's not a lot I can say without giving away the event in the middle of the film, so I'll just say this:
If you like darker, gritty, borderline torture porn (but not actual torture porn, this is no mere Captivity), horror movies, you could do a lot worse.
Yup, I remember watching this one and really enjoying it. Sadly my crap memory of what I watch makes me forget what the bit was in the middle, but its things like this that make me ignore critics viewpoints.
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