Flaming look Dante Tomaselli is one of those directors who are good at only one thing - in creating an atmosphere. Tomaselli has no idea how to write a story, how to make actors play more or less tolerable, how to put a shot and how to make a film, you know, like a movie. But the atmosphere in his paintings - spoon draw. In 2006, he released the relatively low-budget horror film Satan’s Sandbox, to which, in principle, much of what I’m going to say about Torture Chamber was applicable, but one of the few advantages was the sticky feeling of a stuffy midday nightmare that permeated the entire film and remained on the subcortex of consciousness for quite a long time after watching. After that attempt, Dante released a kind of horror film, the Ocean, which I didn’t watch, so I can’t say anything, and then, after four years of thinking, the Torture Chamber. And I'm very confident that anyone who's turned on this movie will turn it off after the first ten minutes, pledging to remember the director's name to avoid making such painful mistakes. But is it worth it?
The film begins with a rather lazy exorcism session of a boy in which the Devil supposedly possessed. The priest, after reading one muddled prayer and a couple of splashes of holy water, puts his hands down and says that the exorcism did not help. The boy, waiting for everyone to turn away, aki Guddini climbs out of the locked cage, hides under the bed, and begins to shake it with an unclear purpose. After such tricks, of course, he is hidden in a psychiatric hospital, from which he safely escapes, taking several children with him, having previously thoroughly washed their brain. It turns out that the boy is not so simple, and masterfully owns pyrokinesis, with the help of which, having climbed into some castle, begins to burn everyone in a row until the very end of the film. In principle, this is the whole plot, there is nothing more in the film, a crowd of children constantly drags people to the castle, and kills them, on this scenario genius Tomaselli dried up, and he could not squeeze a single storyline out of himself. To the monotony of the plot is added the fact that in the film, in fact, there is no main character, as soon as you begin to think that the character who looks away on the screen and is the main character of the picture, he is immediately killed, so until the end of the film you will have no one to associate yourself with. Not that I want to, but it is very confusing.
Some incoherence of the tape does not help the case at all, and it begins to irritate the final – I would like to just understand what it was all about and why we were shown this. Honestly, I would forgive a lot of this creation, if it were at least a little meaningful, but alas. What was the message in Tomaselli's head? A statement about child abuse? It turned out to be rather inconclusive, given that all teenagers in the plot are mentally ill and they cannot be held accountable for their actions. While it’s possible that the director did try to make some kind of horror, if so, it’s all the more sad. The film is not scary, not primarily due to the fact that in the role of killers chasing the population here ordinary children. They look unconvincing in the frame and in their roles did not get used to, mechanically performing some incomprehensible to them actions, so if we proceed from the fact that they tried to show us a horror film – they turned out very bad. Do not add points and never convincing scenes of murders that look so thrashy that even his teeth cut.
But again, Tomaselli did a good job on the atmosphere of the film. She's weird and at times surreal, not least thanks to the soundtrack. The camera work is decent, given that everything was filmed on some ancient and cheap camera, which is why the frame is constantly dark even in the daytime. Heroes seem isolated from the rest of the world, as if they have fallen into a kind of purgatory, beyond which there is nothing, and all their actions have long lost meaning. If comrade Dante did it on purpose - honor and praise, but I do not exclude the fact that this is just another manifestation of the incoherence of the plot. Nevertheless, thanks to this movie still does not look as lost as it may seem at first glance.
It’s not the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It is boring, meaningless, cheap and not scary at all, but, nevertheless, it seems that the authors really tried to do something like that, only alas, they did not understand what. I’m not saying it’s worth watching, no, but in itself it deserves a higher rating than the rating. That's the end of it.