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Realtor-couple Lauren (Jennifer Tisdale) and Tyler (David Frank
Fletcher jr) and their documentary filmmaker friend Ashley (Gwendolyn
Garver) go and checkout a new rundown highrise Lauren and Tyler have just
bought, a sort of creepy place with no cellphone reception (?) ... that's
made a whole lot creepier when Tyler disappears. Eventually, Lauren and
Ashley find a television set that's transmitting live from the room where
Tyler's at - tied to a table and tortured by an obvious madman (Michael
Madsen). Lauren and Ashley do their best to find Tyler and save him, but
instead, the madman finds them, ties them to chairs next to Tyler, cuts
Ashley's throat, then tells Lauren a story about himself and her boyfriend
while torturing Tyler. Turns out Tyler has driven our psychopath, who once
owned the highrise they are at, to bankrupcy, then bought the building
from the bank for a fraction of its value and had it rezoned as
residential building - which of course means its value skyrockets. This
though drove our madman to have his revenge on all those involved with the
deal, which was of course a quite obvious fraud ... Lauren's mom
(Rachel Hunter) is a police officer with homicide, and she stumbles upon a
body of a member of the city council who had something to do with the
building-in-question's rezoning. And when she figures out who has murdered
her, she rushes to the building her daughter is held at ... Somehow,
Lauren has in the meantime managed to free herself, and when trying to
escape, she runs into her mother - who uses Lauren as bait to lure out and
shoot the psychopath ... but not before he has given Lauren some more
information, that it was her own mother who covered up Tyler's fraudulent
behaviour and that she now had to shoot him to save her own hide - which
is why she used her daughter as bait to begin with. Tyler did not make
it out of the ordeal alive, and while Lauren did, she will be emotionally
scarred for life and never be able to trust her mother again. By-the-numbers
psychothriller with torture porn tendencies that tries to hide its
directorial lack of inventiveness behind a premise that seems to be
"ripped from the headlines" and thus throws words like the
financial meltdown and the mortgage crisis into the mix - which actually
doesn't help the film much on an emotional level, as even though we hear
about these things on the news every day these days, they remain somewhat
abstract, and the explanations of Michael Madsen's madman are too
convoluted to actually work and seem a bit weak and vague as the
character's motive for torturing people. All that said, the film is far
from being the worst thing I've ever seen, and thank God it apart from a
short sequence at the beginning at least stays clear from the shaky
handcamera style of filmmaking the pure presence of a documentary
filmmaker alone might suggest - but being just ok and not featuring shaky
handcameras is not nearly enough reason to watch a film, right?
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amazon.co.uk
amazon.de
eThaiCD.com
