Broken

OCTOBER 18, 2007

GENRE: CRAP, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

I love that just 24 hrs after watching one of the best “Survival” horror movies (that would be Inside) of all time, I found myself subjected to one of the worst. While not the worst film I’ve ever seen, I feel confident that Broken (from the new “Dimension Extreme!” label; the first sign of trouble) may be the most worthless film ever made.

Wrongly assuming that all you need to make an effective horror movie is to simply have a woman screaming and being tortured (and at one point, raped) for 85 minutes, without having to bother with things like character development, reason, suspense, etc., Broken is the exact type of film that gives horror, and in particular survival horror, a bad name. Hell, even Captivity, previous holder of “Worst film of the year”, at least had decent production value. Obviously, my full support of Inside, not to mention the Hostel films and a mild appreciation for the Saw films, is proof positive that I am not the type to hate a film just because it has torture sequences. But in all those other films, there was a genuine story, not to mention efforts to make sure you actually gave a shit about (most of) the people being hurt. This one introduces a woman on a date, she goes home and talks to the babysitter, and then she’s kidnapped. I don’t care about her at all, so after 45 minutes of watching her be psychologically and physically tortured, I’m not only tired of watching the same shit over and over, I also still don’t even care if the woman lives or not.

You know a movie is bad when the ugly
digital video is the least of my concerns.

Luckily the film is low on dialogue, especially considering how bad the dialogue is when they DO speak, but it’s all replaced with an almost endless stream of screaming and whimpering from the three female characters. The bad guy doesn’t say much either, instead he just walks around dressed like a cowboy, occasionally doing something stupid that allows for a break in the monotony as one of the women tries to escape, resulting in more pointless bloodshed.

Director/writers Adam Mason and Simon Boyes (another co-directing effort!) would like you to believe that there IS a heart to the film, via the primary victim’s uncertainty if the guy killed her daughter, and the only surprise in the entire film is that the kid IS still alive. Given the childish and idiotic nature of the rest of the film, I assumed they would kill the kid just to be more “edgy”. Instead, the mother finds the child alive, only to set off a trap that blinds the woman while the little girl watches. Oh... I get it... she’s blind to the human suffering of... uh... her. Or, it’s just a pointless ending to a pointless movie.

According to the DVD, this won the Audience Award at the Dead by Dawn film festival, tying with Blood Trails (another god awful piece of shit). At this point, I can only assume that the entire audience was made out of 15 year olds who judge a film on how “extreme” it is, rather than silly things like how well it’s made or whether the script was worth the paper it was printed on (especially considering that far superior films like Isolation and Hard Candy played the same festival). Well, grats for your “victory”.

Fuck this movie. And fuck Dimension for giving it a big promotion. Shit like this needs to be locked away from the types of folks who look for reasons to dismiss the genre as a whole. After watching Broken, I can almost see their reasoning.

What say you?