WE ARE MONSTERS (2015)

AN UGLY AND HARD TO WATCH FILM FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS 

When it comes to horror, as a fan,  have my limits, and they dictate what I will watch and read, but as a reviewer, you have to try and put these aside so that you can look at the product with an unbiased view.  

I knew going into watching "We are Monsters" that this would be a hard watch that would push the limits of what I think is acceptable to the boundaries of my personal taste.  The tagline was simple and conveyed the sense of the film "Three Men, One Woman.  No chance of escape". The plot of the movie is as basic as you could get ​

Emma is a businesswoman coming from Australia to the U.S to sign a controversial oil contract. On her way to a press conference, she jumps into a taxi. Soon after, to her surprise, she is attacked and drugged by the taxi driver. She wakes up tied to a chair in a filthy cabin. Emma soon learns she's the night's amusement for a man named Jim and his loyal associates Pete and Shirley. She must now do everything she can to survive. And what follows is 80 minutes or so of extreme torture porn.  

I'll admit that this is a genre that I am not a fan of, however, I can see the merit of films such as the Hostel movies as they do at least try and inject some subtext and narrative progression between the scenes of carnage.  Sadly this just isn't the case with "We are Monsters", it is devoid of any subtlety, subtext, or even something as simple as character development.  When you strip away even the smallest veneer of such things, all that is left is a 90-minute movie that serves no purpose other than to allow the filmmakers to act out what seems like their sick and twisted fantasies without getting arrested by the authorities.  

Yes, the film is painful to watch, and to some people that would mean that as, a horror movie, it worked. However, watching someone getting raped over and over again and subjected to both physical and mental torture with zero allusions to trying to address it in any away, is just to voyeuristic and wrong.  Of course, she finally escapes and exacts revenge on her captors, but even this is handled in a heavy-handed manner.  It has been decades since we had to endure such nonsense as "I Spit on Your Grave", and thanks to to the small budget, a  terrible script and shockingly bad acting it feels as though you have time warped back to those days.  But, where "I Spit on Your Grave" broke new ground " We Are Monsters" just clumsily rehashes old ground that should never have been revisited.