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In a world where there's a glut of horror/thrillers on the market for an audience with a seemingly insatiable appetite for blood & gore, it is slightly refreshing but ultimately unrewarding to see such a genre typical film at least try to create an atmosphere of fear & suspense for a change. Unfortunately all Roland Joffe director of classics such as The Killing Fields & The Mission creates is a grossly misogynistic torture-porn movie that's a poor man's version of Hostel & Saw; and believe me, that's not saying an awful lot!

Elisha Cuthbert plays Jennifer, a beautiful; self-centered model/actress who has a little history of being followed by stalkers. Alas being a model can be a terribly superficial & busy life with all work & no play making Jennifer a very lonely girl. Unfortunately for her, this is only the beginning of Jennifer's troubles as having been stood up at a groovy Manhattan club one night, she orders an apple martini and suddenly becomes quite woozy. When she wakes up she discovers that she has been kidnapped; imprisoned & tied up in some sort of underground dungeon being watched very closely on camera by a hooded weirdo: Ben (Pruitt Taylor Vince) who seems to know a little too much about her.

He starts to play games with her playing on her fear of the dark and her desperate craving for attention that she revealed in one of her many interviews forcing her to dress up in short skirts & stilettos and drink his lovely concoction of liquidized eyeballs. Jennifer thinks she's alone until she discovers that the crazy man has imprisoned a pretty boy too: Gary (Daniel Gillies) and one thing leads to another until eventually there's some unfortunately portrayed physical interaction. And in a torture dungeon of all places with Jennifer remaining impossibly beautiful throughout the whole ordeal, please give me a break!

Cuthbert (star of hit T.V. series 24 & House of Wax) seems to setting her stall out to be the next queen of scream, me thinks she should stick to the TV as she was horribly unconvincing while Gillies (Bride & Prejudice) seems to be there just to look good & provide Jennifer with her romantic underground liaison and Pruitt Taylor Vince (Deadwood) is watchable but is not given near enough screen time and is given some horribly unoriginal things to do!

You'll be screaming long before the end of it: "Please, let me go; let me go!" Not because you're actually scared but because of the bad acting; cheesy dialog; dirty story and predictable twists which had little or no real fear; suspense or thrills to recommend it, which is a surprise considering the thrilling tense & atmospheric Phone Booth also written by Larry Cohen. This means of course that there's no reason whatsoever to be held captive by this film and finding you're way out of it will prove to be so much easier than Jennifer finding her way out of that "terrible, horrifying" dungeon.

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