Possibly because you don’t need a permit to shoot in the woods I suppose this makes it one dirt cheap and easily available locale for the indie filmmaker, I have run into a spate of films that take place in the woods with some insane torture killer on the prowl. ‘Hatchet’ – which I actually liked, ‘Wrong Turn 2’, ‘Timber Falls’, ‘Severance’, ‘Turistas’ and I’m sure if I’d wrack my brain for a just a few seconds more I could probably come up with a half dozen or so more of these wooded torture flicks. And for the most part I’m quite sick of them. But from the United Kingdom we have ‘Broken’, which is certainly a nasty little piece of a wooded torture horror picture to be sure and it’s not all that great a picture either, but it is a little different in a sense which still might warrant you walking out and renting a copy.

Our film starts with a woman in the darkness encased in what looks to be a wooden casket trying to claw her way out. When we next see this woman she is strung up on a tree with a rope wrapped tightly around her neck, her only support being a teetering wood log and with one wrong move she will hang herself. But our villain has given her a way out, for as you can see by the box cover shot the woman has stitches on her belly. Within those stitches is a razor that will cut the rope and all the woman has to do is undo the stitches, sift through her intestines to track down the razor, pull it out from her damaged bleeding belly and cut herself loose. That’s all she has to do. She manages to do it, collapses to the ground in front our sadistic villain, intestines spilling to the ground, who gives her the option of continuing or pulling the trigger on his rifle that he has pointed at her head.

A few weeks later we meet Hope (Nadja Brand) who is having a dinner date with some dude and when she goes home to relieve her friend who was babysitting Hope’s six-year old daughter Jennifer, she gushes about how wonderful the date was. Hope kisses her daughters cheek, goes to bed and wakes up in the same damn wooden

casket that the previous woman we had just seen woke up in. Hope goes through everything the previous chick goes through except she chooses to live because she fears The Man (Eric Colvin) may have or is going to harm her daughter. So over the next couple of months Hope is chained to a tree and she and this dude have this weird domestic relationship where he hunts and she cleans, tends to his garden, gets slapped around, gets bones broken, gets another tortured roommate who can’t stop screaming – which is bad for her, and attempts to plot her escape and hope that her little girl is still alive and safe somewhere.

Written and directed by the duo of Adam Mason and Simon Boyes I will say that despite the fact this still falls under the genre torture horror which I have had my fill of, it still separates itself from the rest of the genre with a bit of unique twist to staid crazed murderous cannibalistic hillbilly killer that we’ve become all to accustomed to. Though The Man is certainly sick and violent and twisted and demented the filmmakers did manage to make him real character. Not a character in the sense that you sympathize with him, or at least I hope you don’t because if you do I know the name of a couple of good head shrinkers, but in the sense you can kind of understand his pathology. It’s never quite answered why he’s doing what he’s doing and actor Eric Colvin has made failed to make the villain 3-dimensional, but at least he is two dimensional which is obviously better than one dimensional.

Naturally this is a horror movie and it falls into similar horror movie traps that I’ve often complained about, the main one being the female characters complete inability to finish off the bad guy when he’s unconscious and choosing to take off running and screaming. Honestly, what more does this cat have to do to you for you to slam a sharp stick through eyeball and into his skull? Torture you? Oh, he did that. Sex you up? Oh he did that. Kill your child? Oh, you think he did that to. This I will probably never understand. The film is also a bit slow moving as there are stretches of deadness that I know are supposed to be filled with exposition but instead I found just dull.

There is an ending though which I’m sure will please nobody. This is not to say it’s a bad ending, just an unpleasant one which fits perfectly with an unpleasant film. Nonetheless, despite the attempts by ‘Broken’ to separate itself from the genre a bit, it still manages to be a first cousin to the genre and as such I didn’t care for it too much. There was some decent stuff in this film, but not nearly enough for me to tell you that I enjoyed watching it.