Not What I Want!

  I'm not yet decided whether I shall name the film that I am about to talk about. This is going to be full of spoilers, you're warned. It's not my favourite genre and I only watched it because my friend wrote the score. I believe it is categorised as horror, I call it gore.

As far as the story goes, young girl escapes after being held captive and tortured. Fifteen years later, she finds the location of her tormentors and proceeds to exact revenge. So far, fine.

It starts with her escape, there's intrigue, surprise. She goes on to kill the people, including their kids. Wait ... The heroine kills innocent kids? Not too happy about that but let's see what happens next. Surely, they've got something coming up that will make it ok and make me like her again ... well, actually they haven't but hey. I have no idea where this is going so I watch on.

Now there's a monster that tries to kill her. Who is this? ... I wonder. This is shortly answered in a clever flashback that takes us instants before the opening scene. Quickly enough though, I notice the "monster" is only ever seen alone with her and not when her best mate's around. Could it be that the "monster" is just a figment of her traumatised mind's imagination? Yep. It's ok, let's just say it was clumsy, not a huge deal.

Midpoint: our heroine kills herself.

Hang on, what? Surely she's not really dead. Surely she'll come back to life just like that woman she killed earlier. No? No. She's actually dead. At this point, I frowned. My little mind went racing; it is not equiped to deal with a heroine who dies right in the middle of her story. So what happens now?

Now, my friends, we follow the story of her best mate. Why she's still in this bloody (in both senses) house beats me yet, again I watch on, mostly because I don't want to tell my friend I haven't watched the whole thing.

Our new heroine discovers the torture chambers in a secret basement. She finds another poor traumatised woman, that of fifteen years ago whose ghost had been haunting the first heroine ever since. She delivers her. In a way, I'm thinking she's better as a heroine. Not only doesn't she kill innocent children, she actually saves people (even the bad ones in fact). Anyway the poor woman is messed up and crazy and tries to kill her. Fortunately some official looking people arrive in the nick of time with big guns and shoot her in the head. It turns out, however, that those people are actually the evil ones! The torture thing wasn't just a family business, it is indeed the work of a much bigger organisation!

They now lock up our heroine in order to experiment on her. Oh my! Apparently after you isolate people (young women, no less) long enough and make them suffer, some of them reach a state of transcendance. They do. Even they start to see things, like the first heroine was seeing that "monster" woman. I'm thinking probably our new heroine is going to see her dead friend or something (which would get our original heroine back in the film). No. Well, it was just an idea.

Anyway, nothing much interesting happens, she gets skinned alive and all, and I'm bored. To tell you the truth, I fast-forwarded most of the second half.

The worst, however, is that I was left with nausea. It started pretty early on and didn't leave me. Of course I want a film to make me feel emotions, to leave me with something that will stay with me for a long long time. However, an urge for puking is not the kind of something that I want. No thank you.

This film has been shown at festivals and has won some prizes, so maybe it's just me ... bah.
...
LATER
Now that I think of it, some bits I fast-forwarded may have contained the visions of heroine #2, which might have been very interesting and even the point of the film, who knows. But frankly this far into the movie, it was too late. I just didn't care anymore.