Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

You know the story. At least if you’re over the age of six you know the story. A bunch of obnoxious kids go way out of their way to lounge around at this out of the way someplace to have some fun and then die. Today that story is slotted into the gore filled torture horror exercise ‘Sutures’. If you like these kinds of movies then you might want to watch this one since it has some elements which it makes it slightly better. Not good by any means, but better. If you don’t watch these kinds of movies then there’s absolutely nothing here which would make you want to watch these kinds of movies.

Sienna (Allison Lange), who is studying to be a doctor, stumbles into the street all f’d up before she is found by some passing motorist. What has happened to poor Sienna? Needing to uncover this information is hard working tough guy cop Detective Zane (Jason London) who is looking over Sienna all laid up in her hospital bed healing from her grave injuries.

As we have mentioned Sienna is a medical student along with her friend Ben (C.J. Thomason). This crew also consists of the wise cracking Scott (B.J. Britt) and Scott’s best friend Jason (Nick Holmes). We are not completely sure what function Scott and Jason serve at the hospital but we do know they are always there doing stupid stuff. After damn near giving poor Sienna a heart attack with one of their stupid practical jokes, Ben wants to make it up to her by inviting her along on the crew’s annual getaway.

In addition to Scott’s hot girlfriend Kristen (Azie Testfai) and Jason’s even hotter girlfriend Shannon (Kate French), there’s another uninvited guest coming along in the form six foot six inch 250 pound long haired, floor length leather sporting, black Charger driving Krazy Killah Alexander Tatum (Carlos Lauchu). We peeped Alexander early in the movie, eleven years prior, completely messing up some poor woman with the help of a little girl and eventually we will get the 411 on Alexander’s particular pathologies because the man is flat out of his mind.

Naturally our kids will eventually find themselves in a whole heap of trouble and this is where the film gets a little out there because our youngsters are now unwilling participants in live clinical trials run by one Dr. Hopkins (Andrew Prine). Think Joseph Mengele if Mengele was an even bigger asshole than history reports. There will be dismemberments, bone marrow removal, breast implant removal, and organ extraction just to name a few atrocities, all without the benefit of a milliliter of anesthesia. And that’s just what happened to only one of our characters with others getting it even worse.

But it all has to come back to the one who made it out. How this 110lb cutie pie armed with only a machete managed to escape, mostly intact, out from under this fully staffed hospital of horrors is a conundrum. Girlpower.

Directed by Tammi Sutton there a couple of things that make ‘Sutures’ a little better than your average torture horror flick with number one being Andrew Prine chewing up scenery and hitting the top without actually going over the top in making for a very solid and completely despicable movie villain. It always helps any movie that has a bad guy in it to make this character a really, really bad guy and Dr. Hopkins is pretty damned bad. Actually the acting in this movie, as far as movies such as this one goes, was pretty good across the board. Most of the characters are cardboard cutouts of real people which means when they started dying we really didn’t care all that much… and sometimes we were happy to see a few them expire, and we are looking at you Kristen despite your amazing set of eyes… but given these standard horror movie limitations imposed on our characters, this young set of veteran actors did an admirable job getting their characters sketchy natures across.

But it is what it is. Dismemberments, torture, guts, blood and vomit all without a lot of substance behind it. The narrative itself is simple enough, obnoxious kids die horribly, but this simple story gets overly complex in the last five or so minutes. Some might call this complexity a ‘twist’. We over here simply call it nonsense.

But again, as far as movies like this go, and there are a lot of movies like this, this one isn’t so bad. Well acted, well paced, solidly directed by Tammi Sutton with solid cinematography emitting a cold and foreboding foreshadowing of things to come, ‘Sutures’ is pretty good low budget torture horror.