Live Feed (2006)

Plot
Five friends on a trip in China decide to visit a seedy porno theatre after a night out drinking. One of the couples in the group heads off to a private room for some quality alone time whilst the other three friends explore the theatre. However the night soon turns sour when the couple are locked in their room and realise that they're being filmed. It turns out that the theatre is a front for a Chinese businessman who loves watching people being tortured and killed and the Americans are now next on the list.

Review
It was only a matter of time before people started jumping aboard the Hostel bandwagon and here we have one of the most blatant and pointless knock-offs doing the rounds at the moment. Live Feed is a badly acted, laughably shot and weakly executed excuse for a horror flick. The sweet cover box with the rather large chap in surgeon's attire hides a multitude of sins which are evident from the get go and despite a mildly entertaining "all hell breaks loose" couple of minutes in the middle, the film is a drawn-out drag of boredom.

I'm trying to not to be too harsh on Live Feed because everyone has clearly got decent intentions to make a good flick and I'll applaud that. It's just that the outcome is like sitting through the painful efforts of a media college student putting together their first major project. The actors are that bad too - I wouldn't be surprised if they turned out to the director's best mates. It doesn't help any film to have a crap cast and for all of the hard work that anyone does, it can easily be undone by some chumps clogging up the screen. The script is dire and already within the opening ten minutes, not only are you reaching for the mute button but you're hoping that all of the cast meet their demises at the hands of the big guy on the front cover....sooner rather than later I might add. Living up to the obnoxious American tourist stereotype has never been easier! The porno theatre setting is decent. It already looks like the cesspit of humanity when the tourists enter with filthy bathrooms, disgusting bedrooms, dimly lit and sparsely furnished and a wizened old guy hiding in the booth at the door. It's certainly not the place you want to be at the best of times, let alone having some big guy butchering you and your friends. But the setting is rather wasted when the tourists are confined to the same one or two rooms for most of the film. Production values aren't this film's strong point. From the cinematography (everything seems so grainy and dark) to the sets themselves and the make-up effects, it's clear that the budget was blown on getting someone to design a kick-ass DVD cover!

The gore is plentiful, if totally over-used at times. I love bloodbaths in films but when the subject matter is really about torture, I'd rather see a bit of torturing and pain - things that Hostel managed to do well (the cutting of the Achilles tendons for example). Something that you could associate with the victim. You can't associate with someone getting their head chopped off but I bet you could feel the pain yourself if you watched someone on film be stabbed in the leg or chest. Here there is blood spurting out from everywhere and at all times. Great streams of blood spurt out at high-pressure. When gore is this plentiful, the film should have been a comedy or spoof. But it's all played out straight which is the sad thing. There's also a scene in this film involving a snake and a glass tube which is probably the rest it's getting a bit of a reputation on the video circuit. But the scene is silly. Why shove a snake down someone's throat and then cut their stomach open and let the snake crawl out a few minutes later? It seems to have been added to the film solely for the purpose of providing a shock scene to remember it by.

Verdict
This is one live feed that should have been pulled. Check out Vacancy to see this sort of thing done slightly better with bigger actors and a solid budget.