Robert Lieberman’s dose of mean spirited brutally disgusting torture porn entitled “The Tortured” is a lot like “Hard Candy” except dunderheaded, half-witted, and a pure right wing cartoon. Two young good looking parents in an upper class neighborhood are angry that the police aren’t doing enough to find their son who was kidnapped before husband Craig’s very eyes in their back yard one day. Wife Elise of course barely blames her husband, except blames the authorities. We learn all of this information in only the first five minutes of the film that speeds through the kidnapping, the investigation, Elise’s anguish at the kidnapping, and we even visit the hilariously cartoonish Koslowski, a pedophile hillbilly too ridiculous to be horrified of.
Poor Bill Moseley was obviously asked to channel the character Otis from his Rob Zombie days and is a man who is the very definition of the pedophile caricature. He plays lullabies, talks like a daddy, and is so out of his mind he’s busted before he even gets away with his vicious crime. “The Tortured” is then followed down a self-righteous path of moral preaching, right wing social commentary and painfully hammy acting from Erika Christensen (what a decline from “Traffic”!) and Jessie Metcalfe, both of whom are barely believable as a couple let alone grieving parents. For most of the film they feel like drama school rejects, especially Metcalfe who screeches and screams at every opportunity. Leiberman has very little to work with here so the film is reduced to being about as emotionally manipulative as humanly possible. So we’re exposed to Christensen moaning at the sight of her child’s corpse while witnessing flashbacks to her holding him as a newborn and feeding him.
Leiberman is clinging to emotional chords from minute one, and none of it is at all pleasant or original. We know literally nothing about any of these characters and we’re never given time to explore them or empathize with them because at under eighty minutes, Leiberman can’t emphasize their humanity and doesn’t seem interested in doing so, since the film’s primary hook is the torture of an evil pedophile by the upper class white parents of a small child. However, there are some hilariously bad moments of pure schlock that include Elise begging her husband to buy her a gun, their attempts to drug officers transferring Koslowski to a local prison, and both Christensen and Metcalfe monologuing to a drug induced Koslowski like Boris and Natasha from “Rocky and Bullwinkle.”
There’s also possibly one of the most insulting surprise endings I’ve ever seen. I can’t begin to express how much of a waste of time, “The Tortured” is. It’s a sick abomination, an excuse to squeeze in an hour of torture between eighteen minutes of melodrama and schlock that I could barely stomach. Practically a parody of revenge films, “The Tortured” is a moronic, simple-minded, sadistic, eye roll inducing mess that preaches to the audience with a thick social commentary gloss that is used to hide the fact that in the end this is nothing but terrible piece of awful torture porn. For a better example of this material watch “Hard Candy,” “Eye for an Eye,” “Last House on the Left,” or even “Masters of Horror: Family,” anything but this mind-numbing piece of self important dreck.