Victim

Much like either Saw or Hostel, Victim involves people held against their will in a basement for a series of experiments by the evil Dr. Rudolph Volk(Bob Bancroft). His assistant, Mr. George(Brendan Kelly) picks up unsuspecting young women in a bar and abducts them for a fun time with Dr. Rudy.

The movie is never scary and the acting is horrendous by the entire cast. The script is film school material. Do not be fooled by the intriguing advertising poster with a topless woman with a man's head between her legs. I was lured to Victim by the poster, and I always admit my mistakes, and this was one of them, and a waste of 90 minutes of my life. Avoid this garbage and take a long walk instead.

It is a low budget, badly acted, poorly executed movie. The plot is good copied somewhat from a french novel , which in 2011 adapted by Great spanish director Pedro Almodovar. Watch The Skin I live in if you have not seen. If you have already seen it, then don't watch it because there is nothing new here.

A young man (Stephen Weigand) finds himself held captive by a mysterious doctor (Bob Bancroft) and his brutish henchman (Brendan Kelly).

The opening scene uses the POV camera that, frankly, never works in any film and comes across just as annoying here. Luckily, it is brief. And even more luckily, it never really comes back. (The opening is referenced later, but it is less obnoxious.)

This film has aspects of "Human Centipede", or really any mad scientist movie. Like "Centipede", the doctor has an unwilling victim whom he wishes to transform into something superior. I would dare say the centipede is more disturbing, but the transformation here is more drastic. (I cannot actually say what it is without giving away the plot, but I will say once you catch on the film gets a lot more interesting.)

Overall, I give this a modest recommendation. Certainly not among the best films out there, but it is well produced and the acting is above average (the mad doctor is spot on). If you have other things to see, see them first... but this is better than you might expect.

I wasn't sure what this would be truly "about" going into it (though I had read the other reviews and so I knew some of it). My advice if you happen to see this review first is this: If you like tense, sadistic psychological puzzles in which you get to see someone so thoroughly played with that their sense of self is utterly obliterated and replaced and you are open to seeing normally taboo subjects displayed on screen, then you might be well advised to stop reading reviews here and now before any of them give too much of it away, and just go watch the thing. What there is to give away is revealed in the first 30-40 minutes or so, but it would be so much more effective if you weren't quite expecting it. :-)

That said, I really enjoyed this movie. There were a few scenes where the quality of the acting degraded a bit, but I could more than excuse them for the tension and intrigue the film manages to string you along with the whole time. The truth about what's going on and why it's going on becomes easy to figure out about 20 minutes or so from the end, and I'm not going to reveal a thing about it to you.

It is a bit slow-paced in some ways, not a lot of blood and gore, but certainly tense and filled with mind-games. Also a few nicely-laced red herrings here and there to make you think one thing when you find out another is true, and the ending manages to satisfy by not being quite what you'd want or expect it to be. :-)

I'll definitely be watching this one again at some point. Two thumbs up. :-)

Horrible plot, badly made, poor acting. How can this get a 5.9*?! Totally misleading.