LIVE FEED

Five American guys on a pleasure vacation in China come across a red-light district venue, the Venus Theatre. Eager for new and extreme experiences, the young men decide to enter, ignoring the attempts to dissuade them by a boy they meet there. The five tourists will discover for themselves that the Venus Theatre is a venue run by a very dangerous mafia triad, whose boss enjoys watching careless travelers being tortured and killed, only to then devour their remains! The horror cinema of the latest years seems to have taken a very particular path, a bumpy road, full of potholes and without road signs, a road that leads directly to gloomy warehouses equipped with torture instruments and hostels reigning with violence and depravity. A new genre of horror has been born, called "torture porn", which includes extreme films that have the exhibition of violence and the spectacularization of human suffering as their core. The prototypes are called "Saw" and "Hostel": there is no incursion into the paranormal, everything that happens is the work of human beings, pitiless and imaginative; the main characteristic of these films is torture, inflicted with witty machines of death or with simpler butcher's tools, sadism and gore. The more blood flows, the more the viewer is satisfied! "Saw" has already had its routine clone with the poor "Are you scared?", now it's the turn of "Hostel", which has generated a scrappy low-budget duplicate with the suggestive title "Pasto Umano". Unfortunately, we are dealing with a product of the lowest category, a movie made with scarce means that does not even reach mediocrity due to a little credible staging and a multitude of technical and artistic defects. The lack of originality is not a big problem, after all, from "torture porn" we do not expect an elaborate plot and a particular narrative imagination, but what is most shocking about this "Pasto Umano" is the great approximation with which it was made: the cast is composed of a group of unknowns (with the exception of Stephen Chang who here plays the wicked boss) absolutely incapable of expressing themselves in front of a camera, to this must be added a technical quality of the overall packaging that is positioned at very low levels: non-existent photography, amateur editing, anonymous music and horrible sets. The direction also seems completely ineffective, entrusted to an expert in special effects, a certain Ryan Nicholson (in his curriculum there are films of the caliber of "Existenz", "The 13th Warrior" and "The Promise"), who however does not seem at all master of the role of director, despite the fact that here he is not exactly a beginner ("Pasto Umano" is his third direction). The only element that makes "Pasto Umano" minimally interesting to the eye of the horror film viewer is the massive dose of splatter violence exhibited that really spares nothing to the imagination: between decapitations, amputations, pierced breasts and fried and devoured male genitalia, there is really everything! This tendency to the extreme exhibition of violence and the peculiar realization of the special effects, evidently derive from an inspiration that comes from extreme Eastern cinema (surely a source of inspiration, also seen the location) and from Italian horror cinema of the 70s and 80s, productions that in recent years seem particularly appreciated by overseas directors and producers. In conclusion, "Pasto Umano" is a negligible imitation product made in a poor way that has its only reason for interest in the abundant dose of splatter and in the ferocity of some scenes.