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Trailer for "Captivity"

Captivity attained a share of notoriety this past spring for a gruesome promotional billboard in Los Angeles that pictured the abduction, torture and murder of a young woman. The MPAA, upset that the advertising campaign hadn’t been submitted for its approval, publically censured the billboard, which was removed. At the same time distributor Lionsgate washed its hands of the film, leaving it to production company After Dark Films to get it into theaters.

While I’ve learned in recent years to stay away from current horror films—watching people being slowly tortured to an agonizing death is not my idea of an evening’s entertainment—I went to see Captivity because I was curious about two things. First, how bad must a film be to get dumped by Lionsgate, the studio that made huge profits from Saw and Hostel? And second, could something so apparently vile actually have come from the efforts of director Roland Joffe and writer Larry Cohen?

Joffe is the twice Oscar-nominated director of such films as The Mission, The Killing Fields, Fat Man and Little Boy and Vatel, which opened the Cannes film festival a few years back. And Cohen is the veteran screenwriter and sometime director whose long resume includes some of the most memorably schlocky movies of the 1970s and 1980s: It’s Alive, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, Q—The Winged Serpent, The Stuff. In recent years Cohen has enjoyed a resurgence with scripts like Phone Booth and Cellular. He’s a writer whose imagination is far too fertile (the man made a movie about killer Tofutti, fercrissakes) to be writing torture porn.

It turns out that the Captivity that opened in theaters last weekend, to the robust indifference of moviegoers across the country, is not the same movie that Joffe and Cohen made. Captivity was shot with international funding in Moscow in 2005 and shown at the Sitges Film festival in Spain. It was originally conceived as a psychological thriller about a vain, untalented actress who meets the dark side of the public adulation she lives for when she is kidnapped by a lunatic fan. (In a recent interview shown on the cable channel AMC, Cohen admits the character was inspired by Paris Hilton, “a spoiled brat model actress with no talent who has gotten by on publicity…she deserves what she’s going to get. This is the kind of prison everyone wishes Paris Hilton had been sent to.”)

After that premiere, however, the movie was re-edited so that it could be marketed as a gorefest a la Saw. Scenes detailing the character of Jennifer (played by Elisha Cuthbert of TV’s 24) were trimmed and gruesome new torture sequences were added. According to online writers who saw the earlier version, all of the gore scenes in the American release were not in the original.

I don’t know if Joffe was involved in the reshoots, but I suspect not: Even before I learned of Captivity’s history, those scenes stuck out like a bloodied thumb from the rest of the film. Like one of those old Herschell Gordon Lewis movies that played at drive-ins in the 1960s, these scenes are so crassly conceived and poorly executed (the stage blood appears to be from a bottle of strawberry daiquiri mix) that they’re laughable instead of horrific.

To their credit, though, the producers may have been right in trying to salvage their costs: What’s left of the original film doesn’t look as if it was of much value anyway. The full shape of the plot becomes painfully obvious less than halfway through, robbing the third act “twist” of any possible surprise value. (As long as I’ve already referenced so many obscure movies in this review, I may as well say that the twist is the same as the 1969 grindhouse movie Scare Their Pants Off, a movie I’m pretty confident no one reading this has ever seen.) Even those billboards now make sense: If ever there was a film that needed to get paying customers in its first few days of release, before word got around, this is it. A good movie should have something for everyone: Captivity has nothing for anyone.