....I hate the TCM remake.
Anyways, here's what I wrote for my review of this film in the other thread.
"Sorry everyone, but bluntly, this movie was bad. It was sloppy, generic, predictable, and obviously amatuerish. It's no surprise that this film was the first from James Wan, it shows.
I'll go ahead and just skip the plot, simply read C-Dics summary of it if you don't already the plot. But I will say this, the story is not unlike the plot in Phone Booth. A bitter crazy guy wants his victims to apreciate life and blah blah blah. So, using very questionable logic, he tortures these people usually to death in order to get them to apreciate life.
Spoiler:
The biggest problem of this film was the simple stupidity of pretty much all of the characters. They were all stupid to the point of being mentally handicaped. Danny Glover and his partner are a perfect example of this. [SPOILER - highlight to read]: In the middle of the film when they had the chance to capture the guy immediately after seeing him walk into the room which they had snuck into after figuring out where he was hiding. Instead, they sat and watched him for about 10 seconds, letting him get situated and get near the man he had captured. Then when the guy turned on his drill of death, they ****ed around with him, asking him to turn it off, rather then just immediately shooting the machine to shut it down. It took these cops about 30 seconds to figure out that they should shoot the machine. By then it was too late and Danny Glover got his neck sliced by some hidden knife the bad guy had concealed that sprang out of teh arm of his jacket, not unlike the gun from Taxi Driver.Something else really dumb is that the bad guy (who is a god damn dying old man who in the end could barely walk) becomes superman when he attacks someone, moving faster and seemingly with more force then anyone else on the earth can contend with. He even managed to ambush Adam, when Adam knew where he was. Another example of using stupid character as an excuse for the success of the villian, something a lot of bad and sloppy movies do.
Another typical amatuerish move was to have the bad guy win at the end. I'm so sick of movies taking the easy way of leaving the audience in a sense of unsatisfaction and frusturation by simply having the bad guy win. A good movie will find a way to have the story feel unfair while still beign satisfying (for a good example of this, watch Se7en. The bad guy dies AND the movie still leaves us frusturated, but not cheated, as this movie does.
One last gripe, the "twist" at the end was really dumb. "oooooh, the dead body in the middle of the room is actually the killer." yeah, way to pull a cheasy gimmick twist out of your ass.
Okay, now to the positives. The movie had a good, grainy and dark feeling to it. Very atmospheric. Some good sets and props. Nifty, little wierd torture devices. That's about all of the positives.
Over all, this movie was very poor, and used the easiest device of leaving the audience frustruated, and unsatisfied, and ultimately, cheated. If you want a good psychological movie, watch Se7en, or Audition. Don't bother with this generic and pretentious movie.
I'll give it 4 our of 10."