A Thousand Cuts

 (2011)

A Thousand Cuts Blu-ray features poor video and decent audio, but overall it's a disappointing Blu-ray release
A stranger with a haunted past shows up unannounced at the home of Hollywood's hottest horror director, and is determined to teach him what real horror is all about.

For more about A Thousand Cuts and the A Thousand Cuts Blu-ray release, see the A Thousand Cuts Blu-ray Review

Starring: Michael O'Keefe, Olesya Rulin, Michael A. Newcomer, David Naughton
Director: Charles Evered

» See full cast & crew

A Thousand Cuts Blu-ray Review

Torture? Yes. Torture-porn? No.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, January 28, 2013

Whoever did the marketing for A Thousand Cuts is being more than a little disingenuous with us. Judging from the cover art—which shows a bound and bloodied pair of hands below an all-caps "UNRATED DIRECTOR'S CUT" stamp—the film is presumably trying to appeal to "torture-porn" fans. The back of the case reinforces this with an unnecessary rhyme, promising "grudges, gore, and a whole lot more." There is a grudge—I'll give 'em that —and I suppose if we can count tedious dialogue as "a whole lot more," then that particular base is covered, but gore? For a movie called A Thousand Cuts, there's surprisingly little of it. This simply isn't the sort of film it wants you to think that it is at first glance.

No, A Thousand Cuts isn't a torture-porn movie, and I wouldn't even call it a horror film. Rather, it's a sort of meta-revenge-thriller about torture-porn, specifically the ongoing art-imitating-life debate and how we'd be far less cavalier about movie violence if we experienced real bloodshed firsthand. (Well, uh, yeah.) It's not a bad premise—I'm always down with cinema reflecting on itself—but the execution is across-the-board sloppy, from the tries-too-hard dialogue to the cheapo cinematography. To be fair, this was an ultra-low-budget production—shot in ten days on DSLR cameras—but the overall effect is amateurish to the extent of being wholly unenjoyable.



Take the opening slow-motion credit sequence, which alternately shows a woman smiling at the camera, and a burly man with a large canvas bag, walking down a street on some unknown errand. When intending to slow down footage in post, it's necessary to shoot first at a higher frame rate— say, 48fps or 60fps or 120fps—so that when you drop frames to convert it to the normal 24fps, the end result isn't prohibitively choppy. Here, it's obvious that the material was shot natively in 24fps and then digitally slowed further; the entire scene looks herky-jerky, and not in a cool, Wong Kar- Wai-esque, Chungking Express-style step-printing way. Did no one look at the edit and question the decision to use slow-motion? Even the greenest YouTube filmmakers know that you don't slow 24fps footage down without it looking unusably janky.

That's just one example of the technical ineptitude on display—see the flat, lifeless lighting for another—and the rest of the the film doesn't fare any better. One Thousand Cuts opens at what's supposed to be a swank Hollywood house party thrown by torture porn impresario Lance (newcomer Michael A. Newcomer)—an unjustifiably arrogant Eli Roth wannabe—but the movie's budget just can't convincingly pull it off. A spread of Twinkies, Red Vines, and Jolly Ranchers? Seriously? That's what this big-wig is serving at his get-together? Maybe writer/director Charles Evered (Adopt a Sailor) is making some subliminal suggestion that torture porn is the cinematic equivalent of junk food, but it seems more likely that he was just using the film's own craft services table in the shot. Anyway, the party sequence is a not-so-clever satire of industry-types, with a screenwriter pitching Lance on a project he describes as "The Little Mermaid-meets-Jaws," while a bored exec—a cameo by An American Werewolf in London's David Naughton—watches an aspiring actor do Tom Cruise and Christopher Walken impersonations. None of the intended humor sticks.

A clown hot-boxes a garden shed, and Lance does coke with a bunch of gorgeous model-types, but the real party starts when everyone leaves and Lance is left in his house alone with a gate-crasher posing as an electrician—yes, the guy we saw carrying that suspicious bag at the beginning of the film. He's played by Academy Award-nominated character actor Michael O'Keefe (1979's The Great Santini), who's usually found these days in one-off cop/agent roles on TV. Here, he tries on a goofily laconic mid-western accent as Frank, the revenge-seeking father of a girl who was murdered in a copy-cat crime stolen straight from Lance's first film. Frank intends to give the director a taste of his own sick medicine, and for leverage, he claims to have Lance's college-aged sister (High School Musical's Olesya Rulin) tied up nearby, where "she don't have much air left."

What follows is a dull, cat-and-mouse tease that plays like an exceedingly dumb version of the two-man thriller Sleuth, with Frank psychologically torturing Lance in an elaborate—well, not so elaborate, really—attempt to make a point about movie violence. Lance pleads for his life, attempts to mount arguments about how the girl's death wasn't his fault, and tries to escape, but there's no tension or dramatic friction in the film's soporific character struggle. Nor is there much substance to the ideas the film presents in Frank and Lance's repetitive, talking-in-circles dialogue. Even at a slight 77 minutes—no, not 87, the back of the case lies about that too—A Thousand Cuts seems dreadfully long. The film might've worked better as a short, but frankly, the length is the least of the movie's problems. The ugly cinematography, the over-and-under- thought script, O'Keefe's unintentionally hilarious Oklahoman accent—"If yew cud waulk eeevan an iiiiinch in maa shewwws"—it all coalesces into a nigh-unwatchable experience. Torture, indeed.

A Thousand Cuts Blu-ray, Video Quality

 

I've seen some great-looking films shot on the Canon 5D Mark II—Rubber, for instance—but A Thousand Cuts is not one of them. Here's the thing: if you're shooting during the day, and you can mitigate moire and rolling shutter issues, footage from the 5D and a good lens can look fantastic. The problem here is that most of A Thousand Cuts takes place at night or in fairly dim interiors. Unavoidably, this increases source noise—which this 1080p/AVC presentation is practically mushy with—and decreases clarity. The few well-lit scenes are decently sharp, but most of the film is soft and spongy and ill-defined. It doesn't help that there are numerous compression and image processing-related quirks—more than in any other film I've seen in recent memory—from banding and macroblocking to aliasing and chromatic aberrations. While color is sufficiently dense, the ugly lighting and source issues keep the picture from looking subjectively "good." I'm not sure how the film managed to get a Blu-ray release, honestly.

A Thousand Cuts Blu-ray, Audio Quality

 

The film features some aggressively generic low-budget sound design, reproduced here in lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track form. The rear channels are quietly used for occasional ambience and effects—a bubbling water fountain, party clamor, some outdoor noises—but most of the push comes from the front speakers, with an okay sense of clarity and dynamic oomph. The film's score is comprised of what sounds like hard-rock stock music, and it quickly grows grating. The dialogue, at least, is always clear and easy to understand. The disc also includes a 2.0 mix-down, but there are no subtitle options for those who might need or want them.

A Thousand Cuts Blu-ray, Special Features and Extras

 

The lone extras on the disc are a high definition trailer and a photo gallery with eight production stills.

A Thousand Cuts Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation

 

Don't let the title or cover art fool you, horror fans. One Thousand Cuts isn't what you'd expect it to be. It's no grisly torture film, but a dry, too- talky thriller that unsuccessfully tries to start a conversation about those kinds of movies. This would be fine if it advertised itself as such, or if the film was actually any good, but unfortunately, One Thousand Cuts is a low-budget mess that just isn't enjoyable on any level. I'm honestly perplexed that the film found any sort of distribution, and baffled more that it found its way onto Blu-ray. (Though it was shot in high definition, the footage is essentially mottled with heavy noise and compression.) This one can't even go for "so-bad-it's-good" status; it's just bad. Skip it.

Independent film distributor Kino Lorber has issued its Blu-ray slate for January 2013. Releases are arranged through Kino Classics, Kino Lorber, Horizon Movies, and the Jesebel sublabel. Kino Lorber will release films by Victor Halperin, Martin Campbell, and ...