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| Stripped |
Stripped, like
Sx_Tape, isn’t quite what you will be
expecting. Yes, this is another found footage flick with a group of guys (and a
hot girl that has been part of their entourage since childhood) goofing off,
going to Las Vegas for some partying and fun, getting high and drunk, making
sex and slob jokes (also pranking each other in various ways), and using their camera
recorder to capture all of their antics before the horror of what they will
encounter begins. It’s all fun and games until they run across the wrong people
potentially offering them something sexual which winds up being anything but.
Stripped is actually used in this film for a different loss…not as much of clothes as
of a loss of organs. Like sex trafficking, organ theft is another underground
crime that sends chills and is downright horrifying in concept. Visualizing being
drugged and while unconscious losing your organs, your body raped of its parts
while asleep, this is something that works as a horror movie. Again, horror
works because most of the time we are safe in our beds or comfortable in the
confines of our living rooms (or in the cinema) at a distance from what happens
on screen. Found footage adds a “horror captured on digital or tape” vibe that
permeates because what happens feels somewhat real. This is all happening right
before our eyes, recorded by a fivesome with organ-theft far from their minds.
Vegas is the latest city to feature underground crooks stealing from
tourists…instead of cash or jewelry, it is organs. I admit that I grew tired of
this rather early, particularly of the characters involved. I didn’t like any
of them. I am so fucking tired of the obese character made to look like a
stupid fool. I’m sick of it. There’s a character in the film that is secretly
in love with the only female of their group and he’s right off the advertisement
of a Calvin Klein cologne. He can wear a hoodie, faded jeans, a pair of dark
shades, with a ciggie unlit and protruding from his lips, made to look like the
whole nine yards of a GQ model, while the only fat guy of the film is presented
as gross, crude, horny, buffoonish, and dopey. This kind of casting just leaves
me ambivalent. You lose me and a lot of others I’m sure that are simply tired
of this typecasting. Seeing pretty boys talking about getting laid in Vegas
leaves me flat cold. I could give a rat’s ass if they lose their organs. That’s
a problem to me because I want to care. If they mean even remotely something to
me, their fates leave an effect with me. I don’t want to see them suffer and
die. I personally am tired of rooting for characters to die. I am at that point
in my life as a horror fan that wishing for obnoxious jerk-offs to die horribly
(or just not caring if they do) has grown taxing. I’m 37, not 20 anymore. If
those involved in
Stripped has at least made the big guy likable and not a
dumbo, I could have felt something for his fate. However, he dies
unceremoniously; dismissed like a secondary goof, a honey takes to him with a
knife. Off with the fat guy’s head…in horror, there seems to be little use for
him. At least the African-American character is getting a little love in horror
these days…while still often dying somewhere in the middle of the film, he’s
not as shitted on as the fat guy. Venting over. One of the characters, after
the guys decided to take a drive to this stripper location (instead of having
strippers come to them which would have been the safer option) after calling up
a girl named Candice, says that this could be a bad decision in a long line of
bad decisions…he’s correct. They come to a place that looks like an abandoned
warehouse yet still decide to go inside. The film slightly disembarks from the
found footage formula when the boys are attacked and strapped for organ
removal. The girls seductively lure them in and eventually subdue or kill them.
Shots from security cameras throughout the “organ removal warehouse brothel”
provide some extra footage. Then this shifts to the female of the group and her
phone camera’s footage once she leaves her boys after meeting up with her
boyfriend and his pals. Soon she learns that her man was bagging a whore
overseas in the military and returns to her friends’ pad only to discover them
missing. Returning to the male leads of this film…screaming obvious when we
first see the stripper locale, it is hard to fathom cautious fellows, even if
wanting sex, would enter such a scary place. That these guys do and die is no
surprise…they kind of ask for it. Unfortunately for their chick pal, she is
dragged into her doom because of their stupid asses. Sure
Stripped offers her
and a buddy a slight chance of escape but the psycho organ doc is not far
behind. This is a film that portrays those over this sketchy, sick operation of
organ harvesting as cold-blooded and conscienceless, totally devoid of any sort
of awareness of how grotesque their actions are. Horny men willing to follow
girls into any establishment, no matter how ominous, succumb to bloodshed when
the workers seducing them accost them as they are at their most vulnerable. The
doc is right out of an over-the-top slasher, complete with maniac eyes, silent
stalking approach, and bloody surgical garb. To tell you the truth, I will
barely remember this in a few months. As far as found footage goes,
Stripped is
a mediocre example of the genre; with some tiresome characters and an average
series of developments, only the organ-harvesting is something fresh
thematically. At least this film wasn’t about something paranormal or demonic.
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