User Reviews

The film opens attempting to build character of two young couples. The next thing you know they are trapped inside a house with other people. Their brains are connected to a collection system which measures and deposits chemicals produced when the body is in pain. The captives have 22 hours (86 minutes movie time) to produce the desired amount of this chemical or else! They can feel free to use any of the torture devices provided.

There are two things you can do, should you want to play the game.

A) Figure out which ways effectively get the desired chemical by causing pain, but minimizing the damage to the body, such as pulling a tooth and irritating the nerve ending underneath or... B) Draw lots and randomly torture each other in different ways.

Plan B makes for a better film. The film was mindless and senseless, not like the original "Saw." Unless you just want to watch people hitting and cutting each, you might want to take a pass. Oh yes, expected twist blah blah blah. The opening soundtrack/scene was the best aspect of the film.

Parental Guide: F-bombs. No sex or nudity.

The incredibly successful Saw franchise gave birth to a new breed of torture type horror that many have tried to emulate but none ever come close to. The makers of the Saw knock offs miss the point that made Saw so successful and Vile is a perfect example of that. Vile is gory and torturous just for the shock value. It has a weak strand of a story, characters you just don't care about no matter how invested they try and make you, and no real villain per se. You know a "twist" is coming...its a given but you don't care by the end of it. The film will make you wince, there is no doubt about, some of the torture scenes are brutal although they try (again like Saw) to leave a lot of it up to your imagination. But there is also a fair share of true bloody gore. I really had to push myself to get through it just because the story was just really bad. I mean, the whole fill the meter with torture on each other is sort of an interesting concept but its so badly delivered. The most important part of the film is that you just don't care...how it begins, what goes on, and how it ends.

April Matson plays the scream queen of the film. She does okay, much like the rest of the cast but they are given little to no personality. Her schtick that they make clear early on is that she's pregnant and that's her character in a nutshell. Eric Jay Beck is her boyfriend and pays an important part in the whole story. He does well too. He probably gives a slightly better performance but not by much. Akeem Smith is the token minority of the film. I liked his character, he was kind of feisty and actually more of a hero than the rest of them. Greg Cipes seems like the geeky second string character but plays a bigger part in the final outcome. I found his acting strained and almost annoying. There are a few other supporting characters that really do not much of anything than scream and run around frantically. The last main character would be Maya Hazen who plays the obnoxious and loud girl who wants to turn on everyone. She's okay but she truly does get obnoxious and has a ridiculous scene where she "accidentally" scratches wildly and ends up killing a girl ridiculously severing her neck artery.

The actors are not the issue with this movie, they could have likely done a better job with a much better script. The story is simply poorly written. It's a hack job written by someone who wanted nothing more than to get their piece of the "Saw" induced pie. It comes as a zero surprise that the co-writers and producers are first time writers. Eric Jay Beck (who also stars in the film) and has a tiny bit of experience behind the camera and Rob Kowsaluk who has only this film to his credit. On top of that director Taylor Sheridan has done lots of TV performances but this is his only directing credit. Sometimes actors don't translate well behind the camera and this is the perfect example. Even fans of gore won't find much likable about this. 3/10

Okay, I tried to like this. I really did. When the synopsis is to inflict pain on someone to gather the "chemicals" in the brain, you would think that the people could think of creative ways to cause pain without breaking a leg, or disfiguring yourself via burning. I mean come on, really? Getting your fingernail ripped off hurts incredibly bad, and they do this to give them the extra "pain boost", so why not do that only? You have 20 of them for pete's sake, and they grow back! I felt sad watching this, as the bad person gathering these people must have chosen from a group of people that rode the short bus to school and only for getting off on watching them hurt each other. Yet at no time was any of that mentioned, just camera's to make sure they do what they are supposed to do. Dreadful acting, pathetic attempts at hysterics, just plain awful. If you see this on Netflix just ignore it. You'll wish you had...

As much as I love Saw (and was curious about the evolving story in its sequels), I almost kind of despise it for what it kick-started. One of the (many) movies that seem to take the formula out of context is on display here. I watched it at Frightfest in 2011, which should be a good place to watch any horror movie ... if it is worth it. This one unfortunately isn't really worth the money.

You get a bunch of people locked in a house. They wake up not remembering anything, but a video tells them, they have to hurt themselves to get free. As a reviewer (who was harsher then me) on Dreadcentral pointed out, there are options that don't even get discussed. But it's not the dialogues that try to be the strong point here. It's the torture scenes. While you could see some human behavior issues on display here, too much is left out to make it really count as psychological thriller. The actors seem to have too little to work with, but even that gets squashed away (no pun intended) ... I can't really recommend this at all

Now that the Torture Porn genre has fizzled out at the box office, these films are fortunately going straight to video where they belong. This one has an absurd plot (torturing people to obtain a body chemical that is also released during sex - that might have been an interesting film and certainly more humane!), unsympathetic characters and terrible dialogue. At least a good half hour of the characters screaming at each other goes by before they start beating each other's brains in. I only watched it because it was on Netflix Streaming, where a lot of terrible, direct-to-video horror movies go to die. Only if you really miss the Saw films will you possibly find something to enjoy in this mess.

Notwithstanding the impressive later career of its director, Vile is a shoddily written Saw rip-off which sacrifices any kind of believable scenario to get to the gimmick. Ten people (of course it is ten) kidnapped and held in a torture chamber/house where they have to inflict pain in order to generate enough chemicals - dopamine, etc. To fill vials attached to their heads. There are several serious issues with the plot.

Early on one of the characters says - correctly - that they could probably achieve much the same result by having sex or pleasuring themselves instead of torturing each other, but this is of course ignored immediately as a suggestion, because ... no, no idea why.

The "Why" of the whole set up is never addressed. Why don't the kidnappers just torture them themselves? What is the purpose of this set-up? We never see the people responsible, apart from the mole in their midst and a talking head on a video. If they are turned on by watching it they'll be disappointed because this "Vile" film is really quite tame, not showing much gore at all.

Oh, yes, the mole. That is a whole cartload of WHY? For what reason are they there? At the end, the mole reveals that they have done the same thing with several other groups - so why do they not have ANY injuries or wounds apart from the ones they get in this session?

Having said all that, this is far from the worst film of its type, but it won't satisfy gore hounds, or people who like a good thriller, or suspense film fans. It would be a cracking team game on Taskmaster, of course.

It was more torture sitting through this movie than actually being in the house itself. The movie starts off with decent character development and promising cinematography that makes the viewer believe they're about to get their moneys worth. It quickly takes a 180 into terrible-ville when they're ambushed by the most unlikely of attackers... A slutty cougar in stilettos creeping around at 1 am asking people for rides. Being the poor suckers that they are, this band of genius' give her a ride and thus starts the worst horror movie ever made.

Saying that this was a torture porn would be giving it far too much credit. The torture scenes were short and ill conceived. You can not even put this movie in the same category as Saw or Hostile. The most graphic scene was the movie poster, and that's doing it too much justice. Albeit, the concept was original and had promise: 8 individuals trapped in a house and they're only way to escape is to beat on each other.

The story did not follow through with the psychological thriller theme, and there was very little character development past the first 5 minutes, so you really don't care which one of these character's die.

In short... there's really no reason to pay money to watch this film. And in fact no reason for me to finish writing this review on a movie that apparently the writer's phoned in.

Vile. Yes, its vile, why? Not because its been compared to other 'torture porn' films (which it isn't), but because its excrement mostly. A group of people trapped in a property of which they decide, very quickly, there is no escape even with multiple instruments to aid them and a lack of logic:'if there is a way in, there is a way out'. The gore is mostly inference at best and the lack lustre sound editing and soundtrack only further mute the need for a viewing of this punk arse bitch of a film. Cliché acts of even trying to review 'character development' would be futile in the least, as for the aforementioned twist at the end (by previous reviewers) there isn't one, you would have to be brain dead to believe the ending was even remotely 'twisted'. This film sucks basically.

*Contains Spoilers!*

I generally enjoy when a horror movie tries to add character depth or a plot to its gore - in fact, I usually find it pretty sad when a movie doesn't try at all, leaving you with a bunch of cardboard cutouts running around on an empty stage.

But Vile *should* have left that all out, with how little actually happens thanks to the "plot" and "character development.

Most of the movie is boring, with more gore happening off screen (or being left to the imagination) than happening /on screen/. You see girls scream and cry, covered in blood - but no context as to why. You see men claim they can take "no more", when all you see are a bunch of tools flying their direction. Only the first "gore" scene really shows/does much - beyond that, it's a scattering here and there of relatively tame gore (nothing like you'd see in Saw or one of the "name brand" horror movies).

Which would all be alright if it truly mastered the psychological angle. Instead, however, you get characters that come and go and exhibit no personality and a lousy twist ending that derails what little character development you do get.

Not to mention, the one girl (yellow shirt) had such an infuriating personality that it genuinely made the first half of the movie more unpleasant.