"He's alive!"
This is a rather puzzling film; Eli Roth seemingly has no
involvement, and it isn't set in Europe . At
last we have a film in this franchise which is free of the slightly disturbing
"Europe is Godless, immoral and
evil" subtext that has existed thus far. Indeed, there are two Ukrainians
who are kidnapped and taken to Las
Vegas for the usual evil purposes, and the scene
introducing them is able to show a nice bit of misdirection.
This isn't as good as either of its two predecessors in that
it doesn't really develop the premise, although the room in which the paying
customers sit to bet on the carnage is a nice touch in that it strongly evokes
the tackiness of television game shows. Our three identification figures,
blokes on a stag do, suffer the usual shenanigans with the twist that one of
them is a baddie. None of them are likeable, though, with their liking for
horrible, sweaty clubs with awful, awful music and their disturbingly rapey
attitudes to women.
The actual gore is... well, yeah, uncomfortable. The bloke
getting his face cut off and used as a mask is rather unpleasant viewing, and
this sort of thing is rather more disturbing when divorced from the cleverness
we saw in the first two films. Here it's just gore for gore's sake. The scene
with cockroaches is even worse, and we get glimpses of similar horrors going on
in side rooms.
The ending has a couple of nice twists, I suppose, but this
film is pretty empty and all about the gore.
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