Stitches (2009)

aka, Sutures

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A group of freinds, most of them medical students, head out to a rented house in the middle of nowhere on vacation, Where they are hunted down by a mysterious man.
They wake up in an underground bunker, which is being used as an illegal medical school,, where kidnap victims are given diseases or injuries, and the students of the underground school are tasked with stabilising them. Succeed or fail, once the victims are finished with, they are harvested for organs.

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I'm going to start with the positives again today.

Stitches is a well made movie. It looks great, the lighting and cinematography successfully captures the relaxed atmosphere of the vacation, the claustrophobia and urgency of the situation in the underground medical school, and the familiar feel of the real hospital the movie opens in. The sound is clear, and the score effective, and the acting is solid.

Sadly, the story, and storytelling, let's it down.

The movie, as I mention, starts in a conventional hospital, where Final Girl is relating the story, in flashback, to a detective. To make matters worse, her flashback isn't even linear; she keeps jumping further back during the 'vacation' segment of her story, to describe how she and her friends met. Not only do I not care how they met, I suspect the detective doesn't care either; and even if we did care, there's no reason for the weaving the two stories together.

Once things start to go wrong, the multiple story streams don't stop; we have to contend with the stalker / kidnapper, who has his own motives, and the businessman who runs the underground training centre/organ farm.

Logical problems are abound too; Final Girl manages to flash-back to events she wasn't present for, and there are a lot of inconsistencies in the bad guys' behaviours. Stalker guy, for instance, has very specific, research based, reasons he wishes to kidnap people to the facility; which completely fails to tell us why he captures, tortures, and kills, a gas-station attendant.

To top it all off, the movie climaxes in a chain of twists, none of which add anything to the story, or have any effect on our opinions of what we have seen; theatre less twists, and more needless surprises, thrown in by a writer who doesn't really understand how a revelation works.

For all the problems though, it isn't a terrible movie; it's better parts are reminiscent of the parts of Hostel that work, and it does look great... As with many of the movies I've watched this month, it's more satisfying than actually bad. That said, unless you're going to watch a movie every single day (and probably even if you are) there's a whole bunch of better movies you could watch before having to get around to this one.

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Disclaimer:
If you look through the archives, you'll see that I've been using "Bought from Poundland" as a tag since at least 2011.

At the end of October 2013 I decided that all of my 2014 movies would be purchased from Poundland, and began buying up horror movies, to ensure I would have enough come October 2014.

In March 2014 I took a part time job at Poundland.

In accordance with the companies social media policy, in September 2014 I contacted Poundland's social media team to check that I would be okay to carry on with my plan to use the "bought from Poundland" tag.

I have been given the go-ahead on condition that I make the following clear:

All the reviews on this blog are entirely the opinion of Will Tingle, the reviews are not endorsed by Poundland in any way and (as should be obvious from some of the more scathing ones) are certainly not reviews I have been paid to write.

In short: The views expressed in this blog are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Poundland or it's owners, shareholders, or  management.