Movie Picture

Clearly somebody missed the Captivity memo. Guys...torture porn just doesn't do it any more. You can't have a movie where people get subjected to horrible, unpleasant things for ninety minutes and expect your audience to stick around for the gooshy.

Oh...yeah...you only expect your audience to stick around for seventy eight minutes of gooshy. Well, that's great--cheat them in both directions.

The plot of Gag is fairly simple, and that's the biggest part of the problem. Basically, a couple thieves break into a torture porn movie in progress and get themselves involved in it to all sorts of unpleasant, blood-soaked ends.

Well, I have to admit, at least Gag finally manages to introduces something unusual to its proceedings. Not that I enjoy it, mind you, but at the very least it's never been done before that I can recall.

You see, it takes a special kind of deviant to actually film a big clear pipe wired to a woman's forced-open mouth and then inserting a mouse into the open end, allowing said mouse to crawl into the victim's open mouth and down into the throat.

Is this what the direct-to-video community has been reduced to? Who can film the most repulsive thing imaginable and see who's dumb and/or desperate enough to distribute it? In a rare gesture of compassion, I'm having a hard time figuring out who to feel bad for--the writer for actually coming up with this monstrous crime against viewers, the director for thinking enough of this monstrous crime against viewers to actually make it into a film, or the distributor for actually giving this monstrous crime against viewers viewers in the first place.

The more I think about it, maybe I should just save myself a lot of time and drama and just be really, really pissed off at all of them.

Okay, so Gag has a couple of saving graces to it in the form of really out-of-left-field twists, but this really isn't enough to save it from being yet another in a long string of cheesy torture porn flicks that feature people tied or otherwise bound to things and having really horrible things inflicted on them.

The farther in I got, the more I could only think, "I want my seventy-eight minutes back."

The ending is the only true saving grace in this puddle of slop because that means it's actually done and we can go back to watching good movies.

The special features include English and Spanish subtitles, filmmaker commentary, deleted scenes, an alternate ending, a photo gallery, a behind the scenes featurette, a music video, and trailers for Gag, Bordertown, Deceit, and The Killing Floor.

All in all, it's clear how I feel about this waste of plastic. One more for the torture porn pile, and one more thing to avoid on the video store shelves. Repulsive, vile and pointless in the extreme, Gag is a movie that'll make you do just that.