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Dec 1, 2022 · Beaten to Death: Directed by Sam Curtain. With David Tracy, Thomas Roach, Nicole Tudor, Benny Blake. A desperate choice leads Jack down a path that leaves him beaten and bruised as he struggles against man, nature, and his own insanity.
- (483)
- Horror
- Sam Curtain
- 2022-12-01
Sep 1, 2023 · BEATEN TO DEATH unfolds after a desperate choice leads a man named Jack down a path that leaves him beaten and bruised as he struggles against man, nature,...
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- Thomas Roach
- Sam Curtain
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By A.A. Dowd
Posted: Sep 1, 2023 3:00 pm
More than any movie in recent memory, the new Aussie shocker Beaten to Death earns the label "torture porn." To a certain breed of buff, that may sound like a ringing endorsement: At last, a return to the gruelingly extreme horror of the 2000s, when films like Hostel, The Devil's Rejects, and the notorious Martyrs pushed the genre's limits of violence and depravity, revealing the dark depths of humanity's capacity to inflict suffering. But those movies also had stories and characters and – in some cases – genuine ideas wedged between their graphic depictions of bodily harm. Beaten to Death, not so much. It's like an experiment to see how much prolonged agony an audience will endure without much at all in the way of context or narrative justification or even a point. It brings to mind Luke Wilson's big speech in Idiocracy: There was a time when we cared whose eyes they were and why they were being gouged.
The film begins in media res, with Jack (Thomas Roach) stumbling bloody and alone across an unforgiving stretch of wilderness. No sooner can we wonder how he got there than the beginning of an answer arrives, as Beaten to Death flashes back 48 hours to find the same unlucky dude on the receiving end of a barbaric pummeling, his wife (Nicole Tudor) dead on the floor in the other room. Meting out the punishment is a hulking fellow who pauses his assault just long enough to deliver a monologue about hazing wimps in the military; this charming anecdote is the closest the film ever comes to character development.
Jack will escape, at least temporarily, the prophecy of the title. But his nightmare in the boonies is just beginning. Going for help, he knocks on the wrong door, passing out of the frying pan and into the fire of unfathomable pain and mutilation. Writer-director Sam Curtain has one inventive, harrowing trick up his sleeve: a ghoulish POV shot that plunges the audience into literal and figurative darkness. Mostly, though, what follows is long scenes of Roach trudging through nature and bellowing in despair, broken up by the periodic, sadistic exacerbation of his character’s predicament.
Thing is, we never learn much of anything about Jack. He has no distinguishing characteristics or personality. Wolf Creek, to which this fellow Outback odyssey owes a plain debt of influence, sensibly took its time endearing us to the hapless lambs it led to the slaughter. Beaten to Death jumps right into the tenderizing, with only a few skimpy flashbacks that tell us next nothing about the livestock whose grim ordeal we're witnessing in great detail.
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From the country that you brought you Wolf Creek comes another unceasingly brutal thriller of physical and mental torment. Except this one barely even feigns towards telling a story or following characters; it's just 92 minutes of tediously gratuitous suffering that makes you feel like you owe any movie ever dubbed "torture porn" an apology. Hardco...
- A.A. Dowd
Sep 1, 2023 · That’s the case for Sam Curtain’s “Beaten to Death,” a mercilessly violent new movie that has critics dog-earing their thesauruses for superlatives to describe its savagery.
- Erik Piepenburg
Aug 24, 2023 · Beaten To DeathStranded in the middle of nowhere after surviving a brutal attack, a man must battle deranged country psychos and the harsh landscape to make ...
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- 505
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Oct 26, 2021 · Oct. 26, 2021. Doctors never examined 4-year-old Jayce Eubanks’s cuts and bruises. Child welfare workers did not alert the police to 7-year-old Julissia Batties’s black eye. Investigators closed...
Beaten To Death is sadistic, gruesome, and smartly made and constructed, while it really pushes the limits of brutality in cinema. But beware, this movie isn’t for everyone, but the...
