Note To Self: Next Time, Just Rewatch Swimfan

Sometimes, running length is all it takes to sell a movie.

Now onto the 75 minute long (thankfully) The Tortured.

Quick Plot: Elise and Craig Landry are a successful suburban couple with a cute little six-year-old son named Benjamin. Before you can roll a credit, Benjamin is grabbed in broad daylight right out of his backyard by a twisted child killer.

Naturally, such an awful event does all but destroy Elise (Swimfan Forever Erika Christensen) and Craig (Passions Forever Jesse Metcalfe). Things don't improve when Benjamin's body turns up in the nightmare house of John Kozlowski (genre veteran Bill Moseley). Though Kozlowski is found guilty, the mere 25 year prison sentence does little to ease the Landrys' pain.

What follows is a typically miserable revenge plan that's fairly unpleasant for all involved. Elise decides prison is no payment for what John has done, convincing a reluctant Craig to help abduct the convicted man from police custody, bring him to an isolated cabin, and torture him for weeks until they feel satisfied. In typical no-that-perfectly-thought-out-characterization, Elise and Craig continuously flip flop positions in deciding they're doing the right or wrong thing.

It's as fun as it sounds, especially when we reach the kind of twist ending that does little but make its main protagonists look like even bigger idiots than we already thought they were.

Directed by Robert Fire In the Sky Lieberman, The Tortured is...well, exactly what you'd expect from a 75 minute movie about torture made by a decent filmmaker. The actors are fine, considering what little they're given to do. Like a lot of this subgenre, the entire film seems to be washed in a greenish blue filter that somehow makes the action even more remote and hard to care about. It's not dreadful by any means. Just...well, pretty blah.

High Points

Credit to a movie that understands there's no need to go on too long when you have rather little to give

Low Points

It's just so hard to accept a gut punch of an ending when there's so little justification for its main characters' mistakes

Lessons Learned

Drugging police officers is about as easy as untying one's shoes

Never store your sunscreen in a junk drawer

"Hush Little Baby" may have a nice lullabye tune, but when you actually listen to the lyrics (which show up at least twice), it's hard to not judge the singer as being a crappy parent whose master plan of raising her child is to spoil it rotten

Rent/Bury/Buy

Eh. The Tortured is a more professional production than a lot of the other torture-porn under the radar flicks you're likely to find on Instant Watch. That doesn't make it actually pleasant to watch in the least, so go on with it only if you just REALLY want another 75 minutes of watching two pretty people turn a body into something very ugly.

Because Not All Abductions Are As Fun as XTRO...

Dear extraterrestrial visitors,

If you ever decide to stop by this little blue planet, consider planning your vacation in advance. Yes, there are indeed some beautiful trees to be found in Arizona (who knew?) and some friendly mid-1990s character actors willing to embrace folksy accents, but there’s also exciting places like Dollywood, Times Square, Niagra Falls, Machu Picchu, and a lot of other attractions that may be more rewarding than drilling holes into young men’s flesh.

But hey, we all have our travel hobbies (mine include wax museums, so what do I know?) and so perhaps I’m trying to make the alien cruisers in 1993’s Fire In the Sky something they are not. Have fun. Wear sunscreen. And take lots of pictures.

Quick Plot:

A manly group of lumberjacks enter a folksy Arizona bar in near shell shock. Led by a strangely scruffy Robert Patrick as Mike, the men tentatively agree to stick to their story and call in the police (quickly aided by famed Montana detective James Garner) to explain some very mysterious happenings.

We learn in flashback that the gang was finishing up a day’s work tearing down a forest when, upon driving home after sunset, an incredible red light filled the horizon. Big dreamer Travis (D.B. Sweeney, forever he of ‘toepick’ Cutting Edge fame and one of my favorite drunken celebrity encounters in the subway ever) insisted on investigating, wandering under a gigantic space ship before being stuck by its beam. 

With the rest of the fellas squealing like thirteen year old girls learning that Robert Pattinson is really a slug in a man’s suit, Mike speeds away and leaves his best friend/fiance of his kid sister to his mysterious fate.

Upon returning to the clearing, Mike can find no sign of Travis. A search party is mounted, failing to come up with any evidence of the young man’s whereabouts. In the small town, people talk. Well, not quite. They just constantly stop what they’re doing any time the suspicious loggers enter a public place so as to ogle and whisper inaudibly in judgement.

Fire in the Sky is an interesting, if strangely organized thriller that doesn’t quite know where the best part of its story is located. As Mike, Robert Patrick is sympathetic and believable, but we as the audience just aren’t that interested in the financial and marital problems brought on by his insistence to tell the truth. Similarly, Craig Sheffer’s moody Dallis never makes much sense in the big picture: Garner and the rest of the police force want to make the ex-con a prime suspect, but we as the audience already know he (and all the men) are innocent. Why waste time developing a subplot that simply won’t go anywhere?

The answer, of course, stems from those five little words that tend to mildly doom any promising premise: Based. On. A. True. Story. 

Travis Walton did and does exist, and Fire In the Sky is supposedly a fairly accurate story to his tellings of what happened that day in 1975. The grabby tagline is fine for unsettling a certain audience, but the film unfortunately falls into a bland formula that insists on documenting the police investigation and relationship drama that came from the event. 

Of course, most people that celebrate this movie focus on the third act, where (mild spoiler, but not really) the newly recovered Travis remembers just what happened to him  in those five mysterious days. For this reason alone, Fire In the Sky remains a powerful, creepy little film that finds new ways to portray a not-so-friendly (though never quite defined) race of extraterrestrials. It doesn’t completely redeem what comes before (and after) it, but this sequence is truly terrifying and, whether ‘true’ or not, sends satisfying chills down any viewer’s spine.

High Points

Right from the opening, we totally believe Robert Patrick to be everything the town sheriff says: a good straight man with a clear record to his name. Though I kind of hated where his character ended up (more due to scripting than performance), I’d say Patrick  grounds the film with believable sympathy

You won’t find a review of this film that doesn’t compliment the actual spaceship sequence because darnit, it’s truly chilling

Low Points

Of all the ways to end the film, was a quicky epilogue that jarringly swerves away from such a powerful and haunting sequence really the right way to go?

Lessons Learned

Being abducted and probed by gooey Baby Oopsie-Daisy-like aliens will not harm one’s fertility

One can grow a mean collection of facial hair in 2 1/2 years

Unfriendly ETs have diverse film tastes, with interior design styles inspired by both Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and A Clockwork Orange

Rent/Bury/Buy

I was a little let down by Fire In the Sky, but that stems more from the fact that it’s so well-made and acted and yet weirdly misguided in its plot structure. Ultimately, the film didn’t win me over yet at the same time, I recommend a rental, particularly if you enjoy alien-centric thrillers. X-Files fans should easily dig this, and even straighter horror viewers will find some neat stuff.

Also, for whatever reason of contagious movie thinkery, Fire In the Sky is a hot pick for the week here in the blogosphere. For more talk about D.B. Sweeney's shivering and true story tinkering, head to From Midnight, With Love, where TheMike himself (but not as played by Robert Patrick) does some reviewing, and The Horror Digest, where Andre digs into the real stories of FItS and other such films so proudly wearing their genuine status.