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source: Sutures

Was drawn into seeing 'Sutures' with a cool poster/cover, an slightly intriguing but very derivative premise and as someone with a general appreciation for horror. That it was low-budget, which from frequent personal experience is rarely a good sign due to that there are so many poor ones out there, made me though apprehensive. 'Sutures' is sadly however yet another film seen recently, hence some reiteration because the exact same strengths and flaws those films are present here, that to me was incredibly disappointing considering its potential which it doesn't do anywhere near enough with. As a film it's weak, with a plethora of problems (huge ones too) and doesn't do enough with its potential, which was hardly small. There is very little good about it Lets start with the positives. The scenery is atmospheric and spooky. Although most of it looks schlocky, some of the shots look decent. The start intrigues somewhat, shame the rest of the film completely goes downhill and never recovers. Unfortunately, the story does feel paper thin, disjointed and over-stretched and some of it feels vague, under-explained in the last third where the film especially became duller, more predictable, more senseless and less scary. Too many characters are too sketchy and with nowhere near enough to make one want to endear to them. Their annoying and illogical decision making and behaviours frustrates. Making the film feel bland and forgettable with not enough heart put into it. The effects are ropy at best, the sound quality is obvious and utilised cheaply (being too loud in the build ups and people's reactions) and it's best not mentioning the uniformly lumbering and histrionic acting. Dialogue can be stilted and rambling, with lots of clichés and no depth whatsoever, while the pace goes to a standstill very quickly and drags on forever with very little going on worth caring about, never recovering. Found too many the supposedly shocking moments not surprising or scary and the supposedly creepy atmosphere dreary, due to the excessive obviousness, a lot of dumb and vague moments and explanations and the lack of tension and suspense. Would not have minded the lack of originality (the film is extremely derivative and in a dumbed and watered down way) if the story and atmosphere were at least alright in execution, in reality they were both dreadfully done. Not to mention a whole novel's worth of inconsistencies and continuity errors and a structure so jumpy and confused it renders some of the film incoherent. There are a good deal of underdeveloped plot elements and often nonsensical and confusing character motivations, while too many of the things to make you jump or shocked are far from creative or scary and are pretty tame. The ending can be seen from miles away and has a twist so ludicrous that the viewer's intelligence is insulted. There is not enough threat here and what there is of it tends to be used poorly, it is completely unimaginative, very repetitive and more odd than creepy, completely failing to show any sense of horror and resorting to cheap typical horror tropes. Some badly sagging momentum too. The direction is leaden, inexperience seems to be all over the film, and the music doesn't really fit. Lets not get started on the far from creative and shaking the head worthy kills and especially the gratuitous and cheap-looking gore. Overall, weak. 3/10 Bethany Cox

I watched this one late night because I am a fan of non-mainstream horror movies. But this movie was continually confusing. From the dynamics between these so-called "friends" to the way the police inspector and the villain were portrayed constantly made me pause the movie to try to figure out what I was supposed to be understanding at the moment. There was not enough time given to the villain for the audience to actually begin to view him as a villain. And there is a twist ending that does not fit with the progression of the movie. If you have nothing else to do and time to waste then I'd say, go ahead and try it out. Maybe magically someone out there can explain to all the rest of us.

Although that the idea of this flick was rather good I had a few problems watching it. First of all it clocks in at 83 minutes but mine, being bought at a horror convention clocked in at 76 minutes. Or something is wrong here on the database or my copy did cut out the gore? But not alone that enigma is a problem it's the way the story is being told that makes it almost not watchable. It starts off rather good and we do follow the escaping girl but once the flashbacks come in this flick turns into a mess. It's hard to follow what's happening because we have flashbacks in flashbacks and by doing so you are losing the interest in the characters. For what I have seen, heavily cut it looked like it contained a bit of gore here and there but it do has another problem. While watching it my children in the room asked me if I had to turn up the volume that loud and I must say I had too because the audio track is a horror itself. You need to raise the volume to understand what the conversation was all about. In fact, the acting was not convincing too. So for me, some parts must have been interesting to watch but still it's a mediocre flick. Gore 0/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 2/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

I was one of the investors behind this movie and I am proud of how it turned out. 5 stars. This movie has all the twists and turns that keep the movie goer on the edge of their seat. The set up for the movie is as good as it gets. As a reviewer said. "I am about to recommend a torture * movie. I am like a lot of fans, I am so sick of gore and torture that is meaningless. And a big percentage of low budget movies use this in the place of a script and character development. As a horror fan, you just get sick of being cheapened by companies and films that just give you nonstop killing that you don't know who is being killed or why you should care. Sutures, is torture *. But, it builds the characters, and tells a great story and even shares a lengthy back-story into the victims and the victimizers. You understand the motives of capturing people and selling their organs or using them to save a patient. The movie had a few scenes that I felt were ingenious, in terms of torture. The closer this movie got to the end, the more it started to lose steam. The first hour, I felt were good, not the best or worst but good. The last twenty minutes, is where the movie started to try to hurry to the finish line. Try to get everything in before the credits. I felt if the movie was 10-15 mins longer and slowed down a bit, it would have been so much more effective. This is from Tammi Sutton, who produced Dead and Rotting, what a fun movie that was. Its not boring, nor does it ever drag. It just needed more time. But, I liked it and can say I would watch it again."

After barely surviving an account with a group of black market organ snatchers, a woman recounts the experience of her friends' encounter with the maniacs and how they took them from their vacation for the business and how she managed to escape before being targeted by their lunatic head surgeon. This is an absolutely boring and really irritating Torture Film style effort, based solely upon the group being attacked in the remote area and then the rest of the time taken with the different torture tactics practiced on the victims. It's all the same stuff done over and over that hasn't changed all that much, from slicing people open while still alive to the removal of limbs, disfigurement and such that, along with the posturing and endless yakking by those in charge about the futility of escape, it all just drones on and on in an endless sea of irritating scenes that don't get any better. On top of that, the fact that this cuts away from the action to the hospital interview so many times it really kills the flow and pace of the film, which is already short to begin with, so all that's really left here is the bloodletting and gore to really get any positive elements from. Rated R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence and Brief Nudity.

STITCHES is another boring rip-off of the whole HOSTEL/SAW shebang and another unwelcome addition to the 'torture *' category of film-making. This one sees a typically clichéd group of attractive young things end up in the hands of some decidedly nefarious business people working in the illegal organ donation industry. The entire film is merely an excuse for extended and gratuitous scenes of unpleasant torture and bloodshed. Subsequently, the whole of the soundtrack is either full of ominous music or people screaming at the tops of their lungs. It's quickly wearying, and I can imagine that few people would get a kick out of such a spectacle. I found the attempts at cod psychology to be rather laughable, while the interesting cast members are limited to just two: old-timer Andrew Prine (AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION) as the villain, and B-movie stalwart Jason London as a cop.

Sienna, stuck in a hospital bed regales her interviewer with her tale of how she ended up there. Months earlier, her and her friends are vacationing in a charming isolated castle not realizing that a enigmatic man is following them in the hopes of harvesting their organs to sell on the black market. There more to it, but that's the general gist. The acting is sub-par but in this genre on this budget that's easier to overlook. Something i can't though is the story which is haphazardly sutured together. Granted this seems to be more of a deliberate decision than general sloppiness, but this doesn't make the movie any easier to digest. Couple this with a nonthreatening Gothic type bad guy and a nonsensical 'twist' ending and you're left with a movie that's simply not the sum of its parts. My Grade: D+ Eye Candy: Kate French (?) gets topless

*******spoilers, lots of 'em************ I always want to root for indie films, but this is just bad, I mean insultingly bad. Not the kind of bad that's so bad it's good, but the kind of bad that makes you wonder how the crew, especially the writers and director, are still working. The script is horrible. The story doesn't make sense, probably because it was likely never revised or shown to anyone who understands how to write for the screen. The premise is interesting. The story, however, is all over the place and badly imbalanced, especially the whole subplot with Alexander Tatum. Tatum is a mopey guy with daddy issues who is not at all scary. He dresses like an extra in The Crow, and spends most of the movie lurking and feeling sorry for himself. He then disappears for half the film, and at the end, we're told (literally, by several characters) that Tatum is Scary Guy Numero Uno. No mention by anyone about the psycho doctor who runs the organ-harvesting operation, just Tatum. Nevermind that Tatum has been mostly absent for much of the middle of the film, and that the doctor takes center stage for a long time. The way the other characters talk about Tatum, it's clear we're supposed to think he's the stuff of legends. It would be easier to believe he's the stuff of legends if the story actually centered around him or didn't abandon him completely for half the film. But just having other characters tell us he is? And mostly within the last five minutes, as if this is an afterthought? Not convincing. The acting is okay during the few moments when it's actually being consistent, but most of the time, it's atrocious. And it's not just confined to one character-- it's like the actors were left to their own devices with no direction, and none of them had any idea what the tone of the movie was. But it's hard to blame the actors entirely when it's the director's job to well, direct them. Though there are a few performances that stand out as really really painful to watch, I won't name names. If you sit through this movie, you'll know exactly who I'm talking about. Ultimately, it's the director who failed to at least let the actors know what her vision for the film was. But with a script so muddled, she probably didn't know either. And back to the writing again... A major fail in the script is the constant exposition. When the characters constantly have to explain major plot points to each other but the audience doesn't see it for themselves, a screenplay generally stinks. This is telling us what you should be showing us on screen, and that's basic filmmaking 101. Anyway, this script needed a major overhaul before it ever was allowed to go in front of the camera. Sutures starts out like a thriller, but quickly descends into a bad combination of a daytime soap and a badly-done and obvious ripoff of Hostel. The twists at the end, and the end itself, are all so tacked-on and badly thought out, they defy explanation. Just because a film is destined from the beginning to go straight to DVD, does it *have* to be bad? As I'm writing this, I wonder why I sat through the whole thing, but I guess it was just one of those movies where by the time you accept how rotten it is, you have already watched enough that you want there to be some kind of a payoff. That payoff never comes in this film, and I should have known better and turned it off before wasting all that time I'll never get back. I give it three stars and I'm being generous. The locations were pretty good and there are a scant few actors who actually gave it their best. But overall? Eeeegh...

Sure, there are a handful of horror movies out there worse than SUTURES. Between them, Uwe Boll and Ulli Lommel have phoned in dozens of misshapen monstrosities in the name of fright, after all. But, as Gertrude Stein once said, a turd is a turd is a turd, no matter what else you may care to label it as. Apparently the producers of SUTURES thought they were making a campy version of DALLAS, in which multiple generations of "doctors" built up a financial dynasty based on the black market for stolen body parts. In actuality, they ended up with a poorly-acted flick totally lacking in continuity. Though it comes off more like an effort at HOSTEL-style torture *, the confusing plethora of "doctors" (no less than 16 are credited at the end of this feature, not to mention 4 nurses and 2 orderlies) indicates that filming was so confused even the extras were quitting mid-scene (no doubt muttering "I'm not getting involved in crap like this!" as they stormed off the set). Nick Holmes, as one of the six road trippers at the core of this story, apparently walked out on his death scene, as he just "disappears" without a trace early on. The twist at the end of this flick makes absolutely no sense, if you consider it for two seconds or longer. The basic premise of the movie is scripted out of the final two-thirds, as the stolen body parts are left to decay in a WRONG TURN-type hillbilly pantry while the dozen-plus doctors compete to see which can elicit the most pain from "victims" before that group of actors can enjoy the only reward SUTURES offers: release from the clutches of a totally incompetent crew.