In a formidable and well-staged opening sequence, a six-year-old boy is kidnapped from the peaceful safety of his own front yard, and brutally abused by a wacko pervert in a dark basement surrounded by stuffed monkeys, caged animals and children’s toys. When the child is found murdered and dismembered, the distraught parents have a psychological need to blame someone, but after the cops find numerous remains buried in the killer’s back yard and the jury gives the defendant an easy 25-year plea bargain, the boy’s parents seek a level of justice betrayed by the court by taking the law into their own hands. Embarking on a daring plan to highjack the transport van taking the killer to prison and then give the monster a dose of his own medicine by carrying out their own death penalty, the movie turns from tense to preposterous. The upper middle-class married couple, played by Metcalfe and Christensen, is too beautiful and camera-ready to be believable as grizzled, emotionally destroyed shadows of their former selves. The husband is a doctor, so he knows all about the devastating effects of injectable poisons. All the viewer can do is squirm as they burn their victim with lighted cigarettes, soldering irons and boiling water, slice him open alive with knives, jam hypodermic needles into his organs, and indulge in other horrors too diabolical to describe. The savage and relentless torture eventually overwhelms any sympathy the couple might get from the battered audience, and the continuing horror endured by the chained and blood-soaked captive finally seems pointless. What begins as a valid thriller ends with a contrived ending that is supposed to leave you stupefied (Is it possible they tortured the wrong man?) but will only leave you giggling because you’ll figure out the trick long before the naïve characters do. There is nerve-wracked tension in the inner struggle as their decisions affect their marriage and sense of morality, and the performances are compelling—by the two leads, who deserve better roles, and by the torture victim, although mostly all he is required to do is scream. The audience screams too, although not many will survive The Tortured with their eyes wide open.

rreed@observer.com

THE TORTURED

Running Time 79 minutes

Written by Marek Posival

Directed by Robert Lieberman

Starring Erika Christensen, Jesse Metcalfe and Bill Lippincott

1/4

Jenkins, Amy Acker and Whitford in The Cabin in the Woods.

On the advice of a friend who described The Cabin in the Woods as the next cinematic “happening” in horror and mayhem, I bit the bullet and suffered through a creepfest so stupid it makes trashy slash-and-burn epics like Humans Versus Zombies and I Spit on Your Grave seem like Molière and Proust. Some films have to seek their own audience like oil seeks its own level in water. Others arrive with a preordained sort of word-of-mouth anticipation that cannot be explained. This is one of them.

A testament to the wonders of writing under the guidance of crystal meth, this nightmare spoof of everything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the Scream franchise totally defies logic, and pretty much eludes description. Five college kids take a motor van to a country weekend cabin. Stopping at a crumbling shack on a deserted road to buy gas, they encounter a cretin with rotting teeth and one eye who insults the women and spits tobacco juice at the men like a cross between Yosemite Sam and the winner of a talent show for troglodytes. Just behind the bloodstained glass window stands a barrel of meat hooks. Oh, I get it. It’s a send-up constructed from old movies and the clichés in Tales From the Crypt comics. Instead of heading back to civilization, onward they plunge, across a narrow mountain pass to the cabin of cobwebs. Rooms with two-way mirrors, grotesque paintings of brutality and massacre, and the creaking door to a cellar of corpses are just the beginning of a set that looks like the haunted house at Knott’s Berry Farm.

One by one, the visitors learn the meaning of “gotcha.” Zombies rise from the swamp and eat the sexy chick’s flesh. Vampires circle the moon and suck the hot stud’s blood. Only the smart girl who reads “Soviet Economic Structures” and the reefer-smoking doofus, so stoned he has to struggle to make complete sentences, manage to survive the monsters crashing through the ceiling, windows and floors. What they fail to notice is the hidden cameras. Yes! The rooms are all being monitored on a wall of video screens in some kind of remote science lab where an army of scientists like the security teams in Russian attack movies shift the course of the game with switches, including one labeled “Zombie Redneck Torture Family,” conjuring fresh hordes of killers from childhood nightmares to rise from their graves and gnaw, stab and mutilate the screaming victims. It’s all part of an elaborate video game that allows paying customers to watch real people slaughtered according to the horror of choice. The five kids in the cabin are innocent pawns to test the mechanics of the game, the way fiends in a horror movie test the sounds of screaming babies as they feed them to the jaws of mutated crocodiles.

The game, like the movie, is a meaningless absurdity. If it sells, people with a passion for gore can experience real terror while the players are shredded, one by one. What the game testers didn’t count on was luring a pair of victims smart enough to outwit them. The game ends only if the virgin survives. Somehow miraculously managing to figure it all out, the stoner and the brainy girl (who is also a virgin) crawl into a grave and get to the other side of the “ritual.” Then the real hell breaks loose and the whole movie collapses. It’s not a movie about acting, so ignoring the unfortunate people in it is an act of charity, but somehow Sigourney Weaver shows up in a neat spin on herself and her own sad contribution to horror movies to warn that if the virgin doesn’t survive it will mean the agonizing death of every human soul on the planet. But why say more? The Cabin in the Woods has died already in a boring finale full of metaphysical explanations that filch from every horror genre ever invented.

This is a first-time effort for director Drew Goddard, who developed a loud camp following by indulging his wacko imagination as producer and writer of numerous TV episodes of Lost and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The only imagination on view here is the creature effects. From snarling werewolves and humongous cobras to a faceless child in a ballerina costume whose entire countenance above the neck is nothing but a round hole filled with snapping razor-sharp teeth, the mythical monstrosities are awesome. The rest of the movie is the kind of time-wasting drivel designed to appeal to electronics nerds and skateboarders addicted to Xbox 360 video games whose knowledge of the arts begins and ends with MTV2. Instead of electronic wands like Nintendo’s Wii controllers, the master fiends working the control panels tap buttons and pull levers right out of Dr. Strangelove. As their victims plunge deeper and deeper, the narrative gets sillier and sillier. Maybe that’s why an entire row of what they call “fanboys” at the screening I attended laughed all the way through the movie, although I failed to see anything remotely amusing. I doubt if these people even know who Sigourney Weaver is.

At the risk of inviting a monsoon of unwanted hate mail, I admit it is indeed a brand-new world out there. I’m so glad I don’t have to write for it.

rreed@observer.com

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

Running Time 95 minutes

Written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard

Directed by Drew Goddard

Starring Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford and Chris Hemsworth

1/4

Today, however, NBC reports that investigators have been unable to link Manning with Wikileaks front man Julian Assange. 

The officials say that while investigators have determined that Manning had allegedly unlawfully downloaded tens of thousands of documents onto his own computer and passed them to an unauthorized person, there is apparently no evidence he passed the files directly to Assange, or had any direct contact with the controversial WikiLeaks figure.

Assange says Manning is a political prisoner, but that he never heard of him or considered him a source for information before reading about him in the press. 

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

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Glenn Greenwald at Salon feels that the conditions of Manning's detention amount to torture.

"For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not "like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole," but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, isolated entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out."

Many nations and humanitarian organizations have classified this kind of long term near total isolation as torture. The treatment is particuarly galling to Greenwald, because Manning has never been given a trail. "The U.S. ought at least to abide by minimal standards of humane treatment in how it detains him. That's true for every prisoner, at all times. But departures from such standards are particularly egregious where, as here, the detainee has merely been accused, but never convicted, of wrongdoing."

Torture is no longer a pressing concern for the American public, if it ever was. The country's attention has understandably turned to lost jobs, costly health care and spilled oil. Most Americans probably agree with President Obama that rather than dwell on the secret abuses of the Bush-Cheney regime, we ought to be looking forward.

Looking forward is one of those clichés that always sounds positive and sensible, and certainly serves the president's political interests. But the years of detainee abuse and constitutional violations cannot be dismissed so easily, because the past is still with us-and so are the dangers that drew America's leaders toward the dark side.

That is why Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the retired commander of U.S. and allied forces in Iraq, repeated his call for a "truth commission" in a New York University auditorium on the evening of June 7. He joined a group of prominent writers, lawyers and actors in staging an extraordinary event titled "Blueprint for Accountability," which sought to revive pressure on the Obama administration to fulfill its early promises to restore the Constitution, the Geneva conventions and the rule of law. The house was packed and there was a sense that the president's supporters are deeply disappointed-and determined to demand that he live up to his word.

What sharply underscored their concern was a disturbing report issued the same day by Physicians for Human Rights, charging that doctors who observed "enhanced interrogation" sessions for the C.I.A. may have participated in illegal medical experimentation on detainees. (The full report can be found at http://phrtorturepapers.org/.)

By gathering data to assess the effects of "waterboarding," painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, humiliating nudity, extreme temperatures and other abusive techniques, those doctors and other medical personnel risked violating both U.S. and international laws that prohibit such research on any human beings without their informed consent.

The C.I.A. immediately and predictably denied the report, insisting that the officers who oversaw its "past detention program" conducted no such experimentation "on any detainee or group of detainees." An agency spokesman assured reporters that its practices have passed careful scrutiny in multiple reviews by the government, including one by the Justice Department.

But the Physicians for Human Rights report is based on information found by the group's researchers in thousands of pages of partially redacted documents released by the government in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. Those documents suggest that doctors helped to enable "the routine practice of torture" by closely monitoring the physical state of prisoners undergoing interrogation-supposedly to protect them from the severe damage that would, in the opinion of Bush administration lawyers, skirt the edge of legality. Most legal experts believe that the practices condoned by those lawyers were indeed grossly illegal under both U.S. and international law.

The same documents also indicate that C.I.A. medical personnel recorded every aspect of each simulated drowning session and collected detailed medical information that was then used to "design, develop and deploy subsequent waterboarding procedures," according to the PHR report. The doctors prescribed the addition of salt to the water because they believed that higher salinity solutions would reduce the risk of illness, coma or death. They also sought to determine whether simultaneous or sequential application of various torments worked best, and analyzed other evidence of the "susceptibility" of prisoners to pain and suffering such as that caused by sleep deprivation.

"Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law," the report says. "These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity."

Should the PHR report's accusations prove true, then the United States took yet another step toward the criminality that our government once prosecuted at Nuremberg. That is a truth we must face forthrightly, as a nation, if we want to hold our heads up and look forward again.

jconason@observer.com

My own view is that principles and values are important. We should not torture because it is wrong and it violates the spirit of U.S. and International law.  We know that in the real world, people violate principles all of the time. Does that mean we should have no principles? Does that mean we should develop less stringent ones? One of our most deeply held ethical principles is about the sanctity of human life. The commandment is:  “Thou shall not kill”. It does not say: “don’t kill except in self defense”.  The principle is don’t kill.  Yet, we kill all of the time. Does that mean the principle should be watered down? One could argue that it has never been an absolute principle.  Wars and capital punishment have long violated this principle.  Nevertheless, its presence has influenced human behavior for thousands of years. It has not eliminated brutality but it has delegitimized it.

Since we can’t operate a civil order without killing people, we focus on the method of killing. When we remove someone from life, it should be done with a minimum of pain in the process.  The eighth amendment of the United States constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment”. Water boarding is a cruel punishment, although we have recently learned it is not as unusual as we thought.  By holding accused terrorists as “enemy combatants”, they do not receive the protections of the American constitution.  Alumni of the Bush Administration and its defenders argue that without torture, America would have been subjected to further terrorist attacks. It is a claim that logically cannot be proven or disproven, but is, of course, irrelevant.

The danger in eliminating the ban on torture as a method of investigation is that it erodes a critical principle. We know that the principle will be violated during times of duress, but if it is eliminated, torture will be legitimized and its day to day use will be increased. Is that the type of world that America wants to build? Are those the values that we have raised the world’s strongest military to defend? America's claim to moral leadership is fundamentally debased by the defense of torture.

It is a tough world out there and there are evil people who are out to do us harm. No one living in New York City or Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001 could ever deny that point. We need to be aggressive and vigilant in defending our families, property and ideals. But in the process of doing that we need to defend our way of life—and that includes our values and self image.

If America is subjected to another large scale terrorist attack, you can be certain that Dick Cheney and his pals will blame it on the “softer” approach to defense and interrogation advocated by President Obama. I believe this is a ridiculous argument. It is also a political argument and an effort to restore the post-Vietnam image of the Democrats as the party that is soft on defense. We do not need to use brutal tactics to reduce criminal behavior.  Vigilance, intelligence, skill and strategic thinking are far more effective.  Here in New York City nearly two decades of increasingly professionalized policing has taken place along side steady reductions in crime.  While civilian complaints against police misconduct continue, and that misconduct continues, no one would argue that the increased safety of New Yorkers was accomplished through increased incidences of police brutality.

Brutality is not a cost free strategy. When police act within the law and behave with professionalism and dignity, it delegitimizes outlaw conduct. George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s famous broken window theory states that if one window in an abandoned building is broken, soon the rest will be broken as well. Misconduct is contagious. The importance of order and rules of correct behavior should never be underestimated. I would argue that if the “window” is broken by the police, if our government tortures prisoners, the situation is worse. If the people who are responsible for enforcing our laws—and our principles—violate those laws and principles, it fosters disrespect for all principles and laws. Ultimately that makes us less safe. That is the case on the streets of New York City. When our police act within the law, they build respect for law.  If police are corrupt and brutal, the fabric of public order becomes frayed. While the analogy is far from perfect, I think it works that way in the international arena as well.

While I find torture personally abhorrent, and I suspect it is not all that effective as an interrogation method; the central point is that torture is not the type of behavior we expect from civilized, law abiding nations. When we look for loopholes in the Geneva Conventions we undermine the rule of law.  Torture is ineffective, illegal, and a violation or our principles. The arguments in favor of it are far weaker than the arguments against it.  President Obama is correct in prohibiting torture, and we should applaud his efforts to end its practice.