The Eyes of My Mother (2016) 1h 16m

If you take nothing else away from the entirety of this website, for as long as it may exist, I want you to remember one thing:  You can't spell "fart" without "art."  Now keep this in mind because I'm going to drag you along with me through this film student project.

IMDB's description for this film is "A young, lonely woman is consumed by her deepest and darkest desires after tragedy strikes her quiet country life," but that's too vague for The Eyes of My Mother.  Francisca's mother was a surgeon in Portugal.  I'm not sure why they're in bumfuck USA (probably something dumb like love) but the mother has been passing her skills and knowledge onto her child.  Then, one day, a man shows up on the property and kills the mother.  The husband comes home, knocks the man out, and chains him up in the barn.  The girl eventually cuts his tongue and eyes out, but not before he answers her question of why he does such things.  Everything from this point is dumber than all the preceded it.

This is something that I would expect to see at a local film festival.  It's entirely in black and white, switches between English and Portuguese, and has long static shots of people sitting in a room or a car driving across the screen or some bullshit.  The attempts at body horror aren't as shocking as they want them to be.  In a time where we have torture porn like the Saw and Hostel films, you can't bring your tiny indie weenie to the big dick competition and expect to stand up against porn star meat slings!

I'm not totally writing this film off as it might be for someone, somewhere.  It just did nothing for me.

I give The Eyes of My Mother 1 ancient Japanese scrolls with men farting out of 5:

The Tortured (2010) 1h 19m

I've never really been a fan of "torture porn" style horror.  Sure, some of the Hostels were okay, the first one or two Saw movies had their moment, and a few others are definitely watchable but just not my thing.  However, this may be my first foray into what could be considered "revenge porn."

The Tortured begins with a couple dealing with the kidnapping, murder, and subsequent trial of the man that did this to their six year-old son.  After he gets 25-to-life as opposed to life without parole, the couple decide that the kidnapper needs to be punished, tortured, for his crimes.

This film is basically broken into two sections with small bridges in between.  You have the establishment of the agony of losing a child in such a terrible manner and how devastated the couple is.  It's mainly to allow themselves and the viewer to feel that this course of action is justified.  The other revolves around the torture of this man.  There are a combination of introspective moral moments and a questioning of the couple's actions.  We get handed some serious twists here and there, but what this comes down to is do the means justify the ends, vice versa, or, is there any real justice at all?

The saving grace of this film is the ending.  I really don't care about the guy's nipple being burnt with a soldiering iron or any of that other crap.  The couple has an odd catharsis to which only the viewer knows the truth and that made me run back through the film in my head.  So it makes me actually think of it when it's done, but honestly I'll probably forget about it in a month.

I give The Tortured 1 prison jumpsuit costume out of 5:

Day 18: Would You Rather (2012) 1h 33m

Oh god!  That fucking poster... I don't even know what the onamonapia would be to describe the internal wretch that my body did when I first saw this.  The noise for me watching this movie though is a solid "meeeehhhhhhhhhh."

Would You Rather is exactly what you think it is.  Rich douche bags assemble a group of individuals under the pretense of giving them money for simply playing a game.  We're not aware of why each player is assembled except for one girl named Iris.  She is playing to be able to get her brother a bone marrow transplant so he won't die.  The game itself is an extreme version where they go around the table with the violent dares until each round ends.  Someone does cut their eye with a razor.  Fuck that scene because not much makes me squirm but, goddamn man!

At its core, this is just another torture porn film.  Giving people the option to choose doesn't take away from that fact.  It just makes your villain more evil.  They try too hard to make Iris overly "human" in this, and the "shock" at the very end becomes all too obvious because of this fact.  I really didn't give a fuck about any of the characters in this, even Iris.  The bad guys made me hate them, but everyone else was just flat.

I give Would You Rather 1 hilarious looking dude bending a sjambok out of 5: