It’s an Irish-made torture-porn movie about three women who get abducted off the streets and brought into a secluded, shitty house to be victimized in a “Red Room.” For those unaware, a Red Room is an internet-born urban myth about a room broadcasting actual snuff to a bunch of people on the Dark Web who seek these things out. No evidence of this being a thing exists anywhere in the world, but that doesn’t matter, it’s a juicy myth to play with when making a discount torture porn movie. One of several off-brand “Hostel” knock-offs, because that’s what the world at large has been clamoring for.
The basic premise: A man and his wife are running a small crime family that gets rich by auctioning off victims to be tortured and killed remotely by what appears to be four rich men. There’s others, but we only see four. Four messed-up angry weirdoes with big expense accounts for people living in what appear to be middle-class homes. They make bids online, winning bid gets to decide what’s done to the victim (women of course), everyone else just has to pay to watch the video. The four guys yell at their computers, that they want to “give that bitch what she deserves” (whatever, fucko, you don’t even know her), while declaring themselves to be unstoppable money and murder machines and cursing out at the other names on their screens that outbid them. Then everyone sits at home and masturbates while watching someone get killed on the internet.
Great bunch of guys.
The house itself is manned by four people. The son of the big boss who runs the operation, two Portuguese guys who do the abducting and the killing, and a fourth guy who is kept prisoner to actually run the tech side of things. “So why doesn’t her alert people in the outside world?” you may ask and the answer is simple. They limit his access to the internet so that he can only see the website they’re running. Three guys who know nothing of the internet so they kidnap someone who does, a guy who is a brilliant tech sort but can’t figure out how to get access to the rest of the internet because his computer is restricted… by three guys who don’t know how to run a website on the internet. Cool. Totally makes all sorts of sense, except for the parts where it doesn’t.
So how is the gore factor? I mean it’s a BTK movie, so they’re relying on over-the-top violence to sell the thing, right? Well there is one scene, Beardo punches the victim a lot, then disembowels her. The rest of the movie is made up of flashbacks of the girls getting abducted, scenes of the girls trying to figure out how to get out of the house, four rich guys in cheap homes playing murder-eBay and masturbating a bunch, and the criminal organization figuring out how to get more money.
Meh. Not awful, but nothing you’d skip out of work early to run home and watch. I’d give it a 4 out of 10 score, maybe 5. Mido, however, slept through the whole thing.
