Alive

Very 'Saw' as other reviewers have said, plus a bit of Misery (an innocent person, or in this case two innocent people, kept captive by a crazed medic). A bit of Human Centipede First Sequence (a madman carrying out extreme surgical experiments). Very good on tension and suspense and overall pretty good and much better than I expected at the start. And I really wasn't expecting the ending! Along with the ambiguity as to what happens to the two victims at the end. As I say pretty good and if you like the body horror category well worth seeing.

Don't believe the positive ratings. This movie drags along with no explanation as to what the heck happened. There are plenty of times that these 2 people have a chance to get out but instead they lie there waiting for this guy to come back. Her hands aren't even tied down most of the time and yet she lays there wondering how they can escape, get up for crying out loud. I got maybe an hour into it and gave up. You all tell me how it ends because I lost interest a long time ago. Waste of time.

Poor delivery. I found myself wishing something, anything would happen. Although there were some good parts, this movie could not have gone any slower. I would love to see this movie redone with believable characters, because it was a shocking ending. I do not recommend seeing, if you do just fast forward through the dull moments and get to the end.

What I said up there. I gave this ten stars based on the extraordinarily original twist alone, even if the rest of the script up to that point wasn't particularly noteworthy and also acknowledging that the movie itself would've been a 5-6 for me if it wasn't for the ending. See, I watch around 300 horror/thriller movies every year and I'm not particularly fond of twists, because I think they're done to death -pun intended-; around 90% of the time I see them coming from the get-go, even sometimes simply by reading the synopsis and picking some clues from the cover art or the trailers. I only truly appreciate twist endings if they're so genuinely original as to justify writing, filming and releasing a movie around them; otherwise, I honestly prefer clear-cut, straightforward narratives, as long as they're well produced and/or developed. Boring twists are boring, frankly, and sometimes even come across as a bit condescending and Dunning-Kruger-ish, specially when they come at the expense of the script's coherence. We see a lot of those, sadly. So, that said, here we have this little movie: it presents a situation that genre audiences are overly familiar with -too familiar, even, which is never a good thing in my experience- takes that path and runs for the dots that connect it with, apparently -and deceitfully-, little appreciation for imagination or originality. It's competently shoot, acted and cut by reliable professionals obviously used to make the most out of meager budgets, so I think 'meh, but entertaining, so I'll stick with it and follow it to its inevitable 'the apparent good guys are actually the bad guys and the apparent bad guy is really a grief-striken father/husband/brother/whatever getting his due revenge' or 'they're actually dead, the derelict hospital is Hell and the mad doctor is a devilish entity making them pay for their sins' ending and move along. Then, the ending rolls out and I suddenly realize that I've been actually watching one of the most original subversions of a classic literary work of fantasy horror I've ever seen in my long movie-watching life. What can I do after that but saying 'well played!', nodding with a complicit smile and give it that 10 star rating to overcompensate for the low ratings left by every genius out there who thought the ending was stupid, when the opposite is true? It has a soul, if nothing else, and that soul is firmly planted on a soil made not of the dust of the overdone torture * subgenre, as it may seem at first, but of that of old Universal and Hammer classics from a glorious past. So, ten it is, for me at least - won't blame you if it isn't so for you.

I really tried to like this prolongated mess. Long story short, this movie needed less talk, a more cogent explanation as to why the flashbacks were even relevant, why was the protagonist driven to such sadistic measures, and what did the ending even mean for the two victims? I hate sloppy endings, the writer/director/producers of Hollywood should stop trying to make people "think" beyond their lazy, loose ended attempts at genre bending final twists. The concept of leaving everyone with a different perception of what the ending could mean is overdone, lazy and predictable.

Renamed «Saw: The Beginning» in Russia while having nothing to do with that series of movies, this is the tale of two severely injured people - played by Thomas Cocquerel (Table 19) and Camille Stopps - who wake up to being tied down to an operating table in an abandoned sanitarium with only a deranged caretaker (Angus Macfadyen, who really was in the Saw series) to keep them alive and give them keys to their past. There was also an alternate soundtrack to this movie made for Slipknot's Knotfest by band member M Shawn Crahan. It's directed by Rob Grant, who made Mon Ami and the documentary Fake Blood that explores him investigating a disturbing movie sent to him after a fan watched that movie. This is a pretty interesting film that has a twist that I did not see coming at all. It also has a really good look and isn't strictly torture *, despite what the Saw connection would lead you to believe.

I went into this after reading the other 2 reviews and of course making sure they were not the usual 1 review shills and I was not disappointed as it is not a bad little low budget horror. It does actually feature one of the actors from the original Saw series as the main character and it was his acting that puts this a rung above your average horror film. The two leads are quite effective too and coupled with an amazing location it keeps you guessing all the way to the gruesome denouement similar to Saw so it accomplishes what many other in the genre fail to do with larger budgets. Its not on the level of Saw but it will satisfy any true horror fan as the script, acting, setting, photography are all top notch so give it a go; it gets an above average 6 hatchets out of 10 from me on this one!