Film Review The Price We Pay: opens with a sex worker

Ryûhei Kitamura's tawdry grindhouse horror flick, “The Price We Pay,” opens amongst a sex activity worker, bedecked in a furious red clothes, beingness thrown out of a machine past her John in the heart of nowhere. Before he drives off, she resourcefully snags his wallet in addition to absconds to a grimy residue halt bath to count her loot. But she isn’t alone: A trucker enters. After a suspenseful minute, whereby an ostentatious 360-degree aerial pan captures her crawling out from her stall to come across if the coast is clear, a gash of orange lite slashes the room together with a tranquilizer dart kisses her breast. We’ll hold to wait seventy minutes for a determination to this scene. Spoiler: It doesn't pay off.

The narrow script from Christopher Jolley rewinds us to earlier that solar day. A desperate Grace (Gigi Zumbado) arrives at the cease of her rope to a pawn store to hock her last valuable. Despite her lite pockets, past virtue of Zumbado’s haggard mien, nosotros know Grace is carrying some heavy emotional baggage. In the film’s best scene, a trio of thieves invades the shop spell Grace haggles alongside a lascivious owner inward the back room. Zumbado’s eyes dart from the greasy hand running her leg to the surveillance cameras filming the mayhem. The actress plays the scene alongside a frozen guardedness that makes us query if she’s a decoy inwards the heist or a incorrect-home, wrong-time bystander.    

Unfortunately, Grace doesn’t have got much to hide. She, similar and then many other figures inwards this film, exists exclusively, evidently, on the surface. It’s why when the three robbers—a psychotic Alex (Emile Hirsch), an oafish John (Jesse Kinser), an honorable sometime Army ranger Cody (played by a workmanlike Stephen Dorff)—accept her hostage, we tending petty near her predicament. And when the quartet escapes to a secluded rural farm, nosotros experience very picayune dread. These characters practice not talk, react, or fifty-fifty walk like real people. They are clichés crushed to seize with teeth-sized crumbs to the barest flat of existence.

Kitamura wants to brand a B, maybe fifty-fifty C-flat picture show. So pesky items similar motivation, arcs, as well as characters that are more than than a lone bank bill appear to merely be inward his way. In the proper hands that shallowness could live a fun feature. Here, unfortunately, they decompose into exhausting cliches.

Kitamura aims for a self-indulgence that moves these characters to the side by side gory kill rather than the side by side scene. The blood springs, inwards “From Dusk till Dawn”-manner, on the ranch inwards which the quartet takes shelter. There, a shaky teen warns them to leave before his gramps comes back. But they practice non listen his advice. Soon they go enveloped inward a gruesome scheme run by a manic MD (Vernon Wells) as well as his lumbering gimp (Erika Ervin), who, under the farm, have got a subterranean arrangement of jail cells in addition to operating tables. A trite, illogical backstory for the physician follows; unreasonable pans by cinematographer Matthias Schubert ensue; nauseating editing by Shôhei Kitajima drives the terminal boom inward the coffin.

Far too oft inward the celluloid’s second one-half, Kitamura mistakes blood-smeared torture scenes as entirely existence worth the cost of admission. Beyond beingness innocent, why should nosotros root for Grace? She doesn’t display whatsoever ingenuity, in addition to the script doesn’t supply her alongside many scenes where she tin can engender empathy or supply us alongside memorable details almost herself. We are expected to pull for her entirely because she happens to live inwards this moving-picture show. In that regard, I do feel for her.

The sole redeeming lineament inwards this 85-minute swill resides inward the makeup together with practical effects, which rely on pasty blood too gnarly props that make the kills hard to stomach. The special crafts mightiness hold been plenty if Kitamura didn’t succumb to an embarrassing riff on “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” for the final, underwhelming freakout. Instead, not long later on the cinema ends, together with not long later on the screams perish downwardly as well as the gore stops gushing, we find that no discount thrill is high plenty for “The Price We Pay” to be worth its stone-bottom terror.