Well, this isn’t going to be easy. Nellie and I willingly signed up for a film that most people would consider horrific and/or loathsome, and I couldn’t really disagree with them. The “torture porn” genre that’s emerged is embarrassing at best and troubling at worst, and we saw it mixed with the new wave of extremely violent French horror to create Martyrs (tiff) last night at Midnight Madness. I picked this one because it appeared, like Hostel, to have something more to it than just a slasher gore fetish.

It started off as promised, both scary and savagely violent. The crowd, sick bastards that they are at these screenings, cheered some of the more extreme violence, but I think less out of sadism than out of astonishment that the director actually did it, and managed to make it look so realistic. However, the film then turned to the torture aspect, and the final stages — though explained so as to appear to be not just for torture’s sake — were so extreme that it shocked even the jaded Midnight Madness crowd. More than that, it had physiological effects: Nellie came very close to passing out, and at least one person threw up and fled the theatre.

Make no mistake, this film was goddamn effective: it scared the crap out of me in parts, it was frighteningly violent (as opposed to the way that some films try to make it seem sexy or stylish), and it made my skin crawl, but it all happened within the confines of the story as it emerged. That doesn’t make it a good thing. It just makes for an effective example of a genre that we probably shouldn’t be as enthusiastic about as we seem to be. Matt Price Brown? put it very well in his BlogTO review this morning:

There will always be something useful in cinematic horror, the film world’s amped-up psychodrama which lets the audience confront, and hopefully purge, its deepest and least-accessible neuroses. Torture porn, on the other hand, is little more than an exercise in human cruelty dressed up in a game of one-upsmanship of “who can come up with the grossest gag.” Martyrs falls shamefully into the T.P. camp, a mean-spirited, wholly unlikeable plane crash of a movie whose only lingering aftertaste is shame.

While I feel I have to give Martyrs a B for how effectively it did what it did (which is to say, freak me right the hell out), I feel I should also point out that Nellie and I have decided not to watch films of this kind anymore. So maybe it was even more effective than it intended to be.

[tags]tiff, tiff08, martyrs[/tags]