Movie Review: Captivity (2007)

I just watched 30 Days to Night, which has a pretty bad ending, but it does not even compare to the God-awful ending that Captivity, starring hottie Elisha Cuthbert, offers. I mean, talk about out of left field, the bleachers, the street and the warehouse across the street out there.

Captivity is essentially a Saw rip-off (and I thought Saw sucked), only with less amounts of gore and less excitement. At the same time, it does offer one of the grossest scenes I've ever seen, which involves sticking a funnel down Elisha's throat and forcing her to swallow a blended concoction of noses, ears, guts and blood. Lovely.

Read my full Captivity movie review. The horror picture lands on DVD next week, and offers a making-of featurette, an on-the-set featurette and some deleted scenes, including alternate endings (although they aren't that alternate).

Movie trailer review: Captivity

The full movie trailer for Captivity is now online, and what can one say... it looks pretty dumb. Not all too different than films like Saw and Hostel, in that it is about a young woman (Elisha Cuthbert) who is captured by a madman and tortured, Captivity looks to add nothing new to the genre.

Captivity has already stirred controversy when After Dark placed pictures of a dead and tortured Cuthbert on billboards in Los Angeles (I think it was LA), which 1) was a smart move in that it got itself some free publicity and 2) it tells us that the main character most likely dies.

Anyway, Captivity could presumably be clever if done right, but Cuthbert isn't a strong enough actress (or at least she hasn't proven it thus far) to carry a film like this on her own, and the movie is going to have too much shock and gore for its own good. If one of these films attempted to take the psychological angle and extract an award-winning performance from its leading actor, that would be pretty damn cool, but these studios are all just trying to make some money by showing young, hot actors getting killed off in gruesome ways.

I'm not someone who gets easily upset about gore, and I actually like gore in films, even if it gratuitous, but I'm getting pretty damned bored with this torture sub-genre that was never very good to begin with.

As for the Captivity movie trailer, it isn't overly successful in many ways. It perhaps shows too much, and is too frenetic to be very effective. This one will flop.

The Quiet Movie Review

I've posted a movie review for The Quiet over at Movie-Source.com. The movie stars Elisha Cuthbert from "24" and Camilla Belle from When a Stranger Calls as two quasi-sisters who start out hating each other but form a bond as Belle's character realizes that her new family is about as screwed up as families get, despite on the surface looking quite normal.
After When a Stranger Calls, Belle could only move up in the world, and The Quiet is a huge leap forward. While still not wonderful, the movie holds it own, and the best part is that it stars two super hot female leads!
Read our Quiet movie review.