The Tortured (2010)

 The twist at the end, while I get that it was meant to comment as a message against using violence, vengeance, and vigilantism as revenge for another crime (the death of a child, and parents so overcome with grief that they just want the man who killed him to suffer as they have), I have to imagine many viewers probably felt rather ill at ease spending 90 minutes watching The Tortured (2010), knowing Moseley wasn't being punished but an innocent man instead was (Lippincott). And the torture by Jesse Metcalfe and Erika Christensen is intense and vicious. One scene shows them fuck after burning the guy on their table (even a cigarette on the nipple, pressed down). Torture like crushing his foot in a vice, stabbing his eardrum with a hypodermic, snapping off a toe (complete with a crunch), even cutting him with a scalpel (Metcalfe) and removing organs from his stomach; it can really test your resolve. As the victim cries out in agony, begging it to stop, all of this unpleasantness for nothing by film's end as it was all against someone innocent is a bitter pill to swallow. I asked myself why I was watching this. I have no idea who could get anything out of this. It's grisly, it presses our face right in their grief and wallows in all the excess of violence. Even if it was Moseley, a horror show villain for sure (when the cops descend into his lair and find the boy, even seeing him in a hysterical fit with clownface, acting out an adolescent, it is as repulsive as expected), the torture still would have been a tough challenge to get through. I did, and the performances of Metcalfe and Christensen seriously get the point across of the suffering, but the excessive torture as stated in the title is quite brutal. And, furthermore, the victim's fate, although obviously intentionally unsettling to get their point across against vigilantism, leaves as much a bad taste as Moseley escaping the parents' wrath. 1/5