Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned)   CLICK HERE to buy from V.O.D. Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!

Dean (James L. Edwards) and Chris (Adam Scott Clevenger), two people who have never before met, wake up tied up to chairs opposite one another, with no idea how they got here. Enter Laurel (Sasha Graham), an elegantly dressed quite beautiful woman with a big smile in her face, who reveals to them they are participants in a (however makeshift) gameshow, and all they have to do is answer a few trivia questions. Of course, whoever gets a question wrong is cut across the face, and who has three wrong answers to his name is killed. Of course, the two men don't take Laurel all that seriously - until she starts cutting up Chris's face. Dean in the meantime proves to be a good contestant, not because he's particularly intelligent but because he has taken part in quite a few pub quizzes over the years. At the end of the game, Chris is killed, and the next day, Dean wakes up to another man, Randy (Rick Jermain), and the game starts anew. Several more contestants (Drew Fortier, Tim Novotny, Shianne Daye) turn up over the next few days, and not all make it out alive, but the personal questions Laurel asks now and again prove that none of them is a particularly good person. But why does Laurel do it, and why is her producer (Douglas Esper) helping her without ever questioning her? Do the two just working on making the world a better place (in their mind anyways), or does one of them have a more personal agenda?

Trivial is quite possibly the funniest piece of torture porn I've ever seen - and I have never even thought I'd use the words "funny" and "torture porn" in the same sentence to begin with. What makes this film so funny is that it combines rather contradictory elements as violence and quiz show into a pretty warped way and goes for live TV aesthetics in even the most brutal of moments - and it works, thanks to a clever script but also to Sasha Graham playing a perfect parody of a TV host, who over the run of the movie sees her facade shattered more and more. Now due to quite a bit of bloodletting, this is definitely not a movie for everybody - but behind the gore there's a pretty clever film that works as a media satire and a hard-hitting thriller just as well, and is ultimately a very entertaining piece of genre cinema.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

Feeling lucky? Want to search any of my partnershops yourself for more, better results? (commissions earned)

The links below will take you just there!!!

Find Trivial at the amazons ...   amazon.com   amazon.co.uk   amazon.de Looking for imports? Find Trivial here ...   eThaiCD.com Your shop for all things Thai

Thanks for watching !!!