Experiment in Torture (2007)
directed by Sean MacArthur, screenplay by Sara Angressani, Sean MacArthur, B.C. Hickey
Experiment in Torture is a meta-cinematic triumph, because watching it seems to be an experiment in being tortured. This is exactly what you deserve for watching a movie about strippers being abducted and tortured for no apparent reason. If you look up this film on IMDB you will find that the only entry under the "Fun Stuff" category is a suggestion that you watch another film or that you just ram your head into cinderblocks until you are unconscious. I forced myself to continue watching this "film" in part as a punishment for having spent nearly a whole dollar on this thing. This was one of the last films I watched in my spring slasher-fest and it was a suitable ending to an often tedious activity. While I still had plenty of other slasher films left in my bag o'cheap movies this one hammered a nail into my desire to watch more of these and then proceeded to hammer several more nails into my desire and then torched my curiosity with a can of gasoline. I don't even remember much of anything about this movie, and have little or no desire to refresh my memory. To be quite honest, I had trouble following the "plot" even while I was watching this atrocious monstrosity. Part of the problem seemed to be that somebody decided that if you can't hear words then you won't notice that they don't make sense. I've heard of mumblecore art films, but MUMBLE-TORTURE? Of course, intelligible words are not the same as intelligible speech and apparently the three people who put their collective minds to work on this "script" lost all ability to form sentences in the English language and certainly had no ability ever to string together two or more sentences into a coherent thought.
I am now going to attempt to put together something of a plot summary for this film:
1. Serial killers don't need a reason to kill. They just do...
This is the brilliant insight into the human mind that this film starts with. Unable to collectively come up with any kind of motivation for their killer, the filmmakers opted to go straight for chaos. Then we meet a guy who is talking the ears off of several women at a strip club. At this point it would seem that his means of expressing his misogynistic rage is to kill women with his pseudo-intellectual tediousness. Then we have some elapsed time after which the tedious fellow tries to get several of the women to hang out with him and continue his tedious conversation. One of the women responds with sarcasm. This makes her the smartest person in this film. I don't know what's more galling here, the obviously dumb guy trying to sound smart or the sarcasm of someone who clearly disdains all thought. And, as if to prove that humanity is a lost cause (as if this film wasn't enought proof) two of the women decide they've got nothing better to do than to continue hanging out with this guy. How bored are you people? I've never met people that bored or boring in my life.
2. We fast forward again (because time and space have no meaning to us anymore) to the girls in their car following the tedious guy in his car. They don't know where he's leading them but now they're stopped and he comes to their car. After some more tediousness the girls attempt to thank him for a lovely evening and go home.
Tedious Guy: I was just wondering, do either of you girls like Johnny Mathis?
Passenger Girl [shrieks with excitement]: I love Johnny Mathis!
Tedious guy punches the driver girl and then fast forward to them in the woods somewhere being bound and dragged around by the tedious guy and his masked accomplice. One of the girls reaches into a bag (presumably belonging to Mr. Tedium) and pulls out a brown bottle that she smashes against the accomplice's face. Close-up on the bottle's remnants on the ground with 2 pieces of masking tape on which we see the handwritten words "Hydrochloric" and "Acid". The accomplice guy then stabs the passenger girl to death and we see the guys running off into the darkness. This is one of the clumsiest set-ups for a plot device ever. And roll opening credits...
I should note here that the driver, Melissa (as if we get a chance to care about her name) is played by Iranian-born actress Marjan Faritous who has gone on to do hard-core pornography under the name Persia Pele. This is a decision I can hardly fault when "mainstream" acting consists of playing strippers who get punched after being asked if they like Johnny Mathis. At that point driving around Mobile, Alabama in a van and having sex on camera sounds like a step up on the career ladder.
And, on a more philosophical note, how would you feel if the last intelligible sentence you ever uttered was "I love Johnny Mathis!"? That's gotta be a bad way to go.
3. Now we're back at a strip club (presumably later, but I don't know because space and time have ceased to hold meaning here) and there are two new guys sitting and commenting on the girls and how they need to get rid of the hovering brother of one of them to get things moving with the girls. This is the point at which the machinations of plot and the revolving characters, not to mention the complete meaningless of time and space, turn this "film" into something unnecessarily arcane. I don't know who these two guys are and what they have to do with the pair who had the trouble with the acid in the first scene and I don't know why nobody in the strip club is wondering what happened to the other two girls. Is this the same strip club? Are we in the same timeline or plane of existence? I don't know and stopped caring about the time I heard the words "I love Johnny Mathis!" if not several minutes before. More characters (strippers, creepy guys, cougars, hawks, jerk-offs) are introduced and eventually some of the strippers accept a deal to go do a private party at a lake-house. A long chunk of time is then spent in creepy driving scenes, less creepy boating scenes and times that we might just put under the general rubric of an "exotic dancer camping retreat." This is part of the experiment in torture. How long can you watch this before you start screaming at the screen like a maniac about wanting to see some blood? I think (but I'm not sure because space and time ceased to have meaning for me) that about an hour passed during which time one of the strippers fell drunkenly off a toilet while trying to pee and another one was in the shower and several of them were in the woods for some unknown reason. Maybe it was two hours. Maybe less, since this is only supposed to be 80 minutes long. I don't know or care.
4. Somehow we end up with a basement filled with women in various states of torture or being tortured by people including acid face...well, mostly acid face. At one point he (or someone else) turns on the other guys and kills off some of them. Again, I lost track of why any of these things were happening. Acid face drills a hole in one woman's foot and slashes another's throat. It all comes off as pretty haphazard. It's all chaos here in the lakehouse of torture. Melissa (you remember her? the one who got punched in the face in the car...) comes back and shoots acid face, cuts off his hand and then helps the survivors to escape.
Melissa: You should have finished what you started.
Well, unless you're talking about this movie, in which case you should have quit and gotten jobs at Whataburger.
Melissa: How does it feel for your stupid fucking life to be an experiment?
I'm not sure, but thanks for asking. Also, I'm beginning to really dislike Johnny Mathis.
5. There's some sort of meaningless denouement with the good guy males (there were some?) regretting not being the ones to kill acid face themselves. And then we get a shot of Melissa sitting in a chair with a haunted look in her eyes (on account of not knowing about how she feels about Johnny Mathis--and, of course the horrific torture and killing and other deviant acts we can only imagine). This is supposed to be meaningful. It's not. All meaning was lost about the time the opening credits rolled on this thing, maybe well before that. I wouldn't know, because all time and space have lost meaning for me thanks to this film.
6. As if this wasn't enough there's an "Experiment in Torture" theme song specially written for the ending that seems to have been written by a Strawberry Alarm Clock tribute band with lyrics by Johnny Mathis. Will the torture never end? How long must this experiment go on? (The actual artist is named Zoomer. Zoomer needs to get a job begging for leftover grease in front of a Whataburger.)
7. Jesus on a stick, there's a post-credits behind the scenes tag moment! Stop it! I hate Johnny Mathis! Stop making movies!
Finally, the madness stops. It's morning again in America. I eject this disc from my player. Life can continue on. What was this experiment about? Will we ever know? I honestly don't care. I think the thing about miserably bad movies is that each one is horrible in its own way, which is what makes it difficult to pick one film as the worst film ever. I mean, Experiment in Torture is one of the worst films I've ever seen. I really hated it. But it's like saying one specific rat dropping is the worst rat dropping you've ever tasted. No matter how many rat droppings you taste, you don't really become a conoisseur who can rank them in terms of foulness, the last one you had will continue to be the worst one you've ever tasted until you stumble upon another one. Now, the mark of wisdom is the person who avoids tasting any rat droppings.
But artifacts of culture (books, movies, etc) are like relationships. You don't know how bad it's going to be until you're in it. You could avoid some of the worse ones, sure, but sometimes you just have to take a chance instead of staying home and watching Man vs. Food. Experiment in Torture is like going out on a date with someone who walks around twirling a loaded pistol. You know you're going to get shot before the night is out, but if you're bored enough you might go ahead and go to dinner just to see what happens. The answer, of course, is that you're going to get shot. Also, you might start imagining that the whole film is taking place in Johnny Mathis's imagination. Mostly, though, you'll be disgusted with yourself, with the people who made this film and with Johnny Mathis. If this was the last film left in the world I would destroy it and start from scratch with the idea of moving pictures.
And another thing...
Are you seriously telling me it took THREE people to come up with this? It only took one person to write Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Anna Karenina only took one writer. But Experiment in Torture needed three people. I would be more forgiving if this had been the product of one deranged mind. But a trio means that at any given moment when even two people might go off the deep end and agree on a bad idea then there was a third person who not only didn't put the brakes on this crazy train but who shoveled more shit-covered coal into the engine of madness. Three people? Really? Three monkeys throwing poop on a wall could have come up with a more coherent script. Forget what I said earlier. If these three people were working at Whataburger they'd hand me a bag filled with dried hippo turds and say "here are your fries!"
Trailers (for what can only be better movies)
1. Saw III
There's a line in this trailer that goes: Suffering? You haven't seen anything yet.
Do you people not know what disc you've put this on? I just watched Experiment in Torture you stupid puppet face bastard. I KNOW SUFFERING and you have no idea who you're dealing with here. I will tear you into little pieces and then make those little pieces watch this movie until Johnny Mathis shows up to punch you in the pieces of your dismembered face and then ask you "How do you like me, now, puppet ass!" Saw III? Saw your ass! Saw your tiny leathery puppet ballsack! Saw your mom!
2. Captivity
Elisha Cuthbert is being held in a torture dungeon. To paraphrase that Dodge commercial there are three things that America got right: Cars, Freedom and Torture. Guess which one is represented here.
3. Holla
Ah yes, the long awaited all-black remake of Scream. I'm not joking. I'm not sure anyone other than Johnny Mathis was waiting for this, but it was long-awaited.
4. Night of the Living Dead 3D
De3d
Zombies in 3-D might be cool, but can we have something like Late Afternoon of the Living Dead or Naptime with the Living Dead?
5. Fido
In this awesome film zombies (including Billy Connolly) are kept as pets and menial servants by normal people. It's tender and heartwarming, wacky and offbeat, zany and irreverent and also water soluble.
6. Dark Storm
A government experiment has gone awry and now the only person who can save us is Stephen Baldwin. I want you to think about that sentence for one full minute...and then never think about it again.
I've never seen that much dark matter in one place.
Other than in Stephen Baldwin's testes, that is.
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