ROGUE RIVER

Mara is a girl whose father has died and who travels to Rogue River to scatter his ashes. Once she arrives in this remote area, she finds herself without a car and with a stranger offering her a ride home. Mara accepts, but when she stops to sleep at the man's house, she will realize that he is not the good person she thought he was. When a film begins with a flashforward that anticipates what will happen at the end, this segment is usually useful to create interest in how and why it will lead to that. "Rogue River" instead probably relies on this device to avoid showing us a bad film in its entirety, because it would be enough to watch the first 15 minutes to understand everything, but really everything that will happen. And if on the one hand it is true what was written earlier, on the other hand that first quarter of an hour does not even make us imagine how much stupidity and how embarrassing plot twists will lead to the closure of this "job." But let's proceed in order. The plot itself does not hide particular novelties because we are dealing with the elderly couple of crazy people who live in the middle of nowhere and who happen to have a girl in the house, by chance, alone in the world. So far so good, the problem is that soon everything turns into a "cops and robbers" between idiots, completely senseless and grotesque. The characters make decisions that are at least questionable and very stupid, starting with the protagonist who, waking up alone in the room and tied only by the feet and moreover not locked in the room (the reason for "securing" the prisoner so "well" has not reached us) heads towards the basement without arming herself, without taking the chains in hand when she goes down the stairs to avoid the noise, without hitting - after finally realizing she has an iron pipe next to her - the man who kidnapped her who is in front of her in underwear and from behind. For their part, the couple of "villains" play a beautiful game from the point of view of intellect and excessive and at times ridiculous grotesque; how not to make a great smile of compassion (for the screenwriter) when the lady pees on the floor while she is taking some blood (?) from the refrigerator with her husband behind her who whips himself with the belt? I insist on this point because the whole film sees the characters act in a completely illogical way, turning the film into a farce that is at times ridiculous and at times irritating that goes nowhere and struggles to last the hour and 20 minutes of duration, despite repeating some scenes practically the same more than once. The intentions of the two crazy people are then never clear at all, but the choices of the two are so illogical from any point of view that no explanation would make sense. The film is sold as torture porn but only one scene is related to this genre and even this one is so stupid and ridiculous that it leaves no impact. It is then useless to talk about the plot twists of a predictability and a stupidity immoral. Despite this, the screenplay manages to have crazy gaps even at the level of plot and development with some questions that remain unresolved. The poor Bill Moseley ("House of 1000 Corpses," "House of the Devil") is here forced into a character as stereotyped as it is brainless and so are the others including the protagonist Michelle Page ("All Together for Christmas") and Lucinda Jenney ("The Mothman Prophecies - Voices from the Shadow") in those of the terminally ill psychopath. Unfortunately, it is difficult to save anything in all this mediocrity of which perhaps the first 10 minutes are intriguing, but when our picture is beautiful and composed it does nothing but plummet towards indecency. A poor product.