A good old-fashioned medieval-style torture show, the kind our great great great great great great great great great grandparents used to enjoy. Slasher movies don’t scare people anymore. If Leatherface is chasing you, just pull out your cellphone and call the cops. Nope, these days it’s all about the torture of helpless victims. Here, rich sadists from all over the world pay for the right to go to a dilapidated building in Slovakia, slip into a maroon jumpsuit, and slowly power drill the cast of Road Rules to death. It’s big business for local scuzzbuckets who drug and kidnap vacationing college students from the local youth hostel.
Writer/director Eli Roth makes this one fun by keeping a good sense of humor about it all, as well as by running with the premise that ANYONE in the movie can die at ANY TIME. In the classic teen meat horror formula, you can often pick out the survivor early on in the film. It’s the smart, sensitive character who’s a bit of an outsider among the party-hearty, sex-crazed axe bait kids. Roth turns this completely around by setting up a presumed “survivor” character and then killing them off FIRST so you don’t know what in Sam Hill’s gonna happen next.
The gory torture stuff only takes up about a fourth of the movie—the first half is pretty much a raunchy comedy about three young American guys clowning around in Europe—but this is the film that inspired the oft-used torture porn label, coined by writer David Edelstein in a New York Magazine review