A battered woman stumbles out of the wilderness and is admitted into
the hospital…once she has been treated Detective Zane (Jason London)
visits her to ask about her ordeal. The young woman, named Sienna
(Allison Lange), recounts how she and her pre-med friends headed up to
an isolated castle for some rest and relaxation. However, a mysterious man in black
followed them, and one by one they were kidnapped and taken to a dank
underground “hospital” where crazed Doctor Hopkins (Andrew Prine)
utilized his new “patients” for experiments as well as harvesting their
organs for the black market. However he and his staff treated them, one
by one they ended up dead…except for Sienna, who happened to escape.
As Sienna recounts her tale to the Detective, she tells him more
about the man in black, whose name was Alexander Tatum (Carlos Lauchu).
Alexander should have been a renowned surgeon, but a tragic past and a
daughter diagnosed with a rare disease lead him to help Doctor Hopkins
in exchange for a possible cure for his sick daughter.
Will Detective Zane get to the bottom of the killings? Will Alexander come after Sienna now that she’s escaped?
Yes, this is another kids-getting-kidnapped-for-their-organs movie
like a ton of other “torture porn” flicks out there. And, in my opinion,
it’s one of the most boring. I was expecting some nicely done gore and a
familiar but entertaining story…however I didn’t really get anything I
was hoping for. The movie never really “grabbed” me and I was bored from
the first couple of scenes all the way to the end. You don’t know how
many times my finger was itching for the fast-forward button!
However, even though I didn’t like the film, let me rattle off some
technical strengths it had…First off, it was competently shot thanks to
director Tammi Sutton. I thought the lighting was great and the scenes
in the underground black market “hospital” were very atmospheric. The
acting was also pretty decent; I especially liked the performances from
Allison Lange as survivor girl Sienna and Carlos Lauchu as the dark and
mysterious Alexander.
These few strengths, however, were not enough to make
Sutures
a good or enjoyable film. I’ve read positive reviews of the film, all
of which left me scratching my head. Did we watch the same film? The
film started somewhat strongly enough once it got past the boring bits
of showing Sienna and Detective Zane in the hospital. The group of
pre-med students was typical, but at least the characters had distinct
personalities. Things started getting rocky when attention was averted
to Alexander. At first he was an intriguing and mysterious presence, but
that mysteriousness was all stripped bare as soon as he killed a gas
station attendant. By that time, too much had been shown of the killer
and my interest in him waned.
Then, somehow Alexander became like a ninja and was able to
infiltrate the castle and soundlessly kidnap the kids one by one. This
just seemed implausible to me and was pretty groan-worthy. The action
then moved to the underground hospital and started to feel awfully like
Hostel.
Except that instead of people paying to torture youths, Doctor Hopkins
had set up a kind of underground medical school. He had the victims
pumped full of exotic diseases and gave them fatal wounds, then
challenged his med students to keep them stable. Or he just ripped their
organs and breast implants out to sell on the black market. An
interesting concept, but it was never developed to its potential. Plus,
this storyline diverted attention from the much more interesting
Alexander (maybe by “interesting” I just mean hot, ok!), who was demoted
from lead killer to the Doctor’s lackey.
With all these intersecting storylines things got convoluted pretty
fast. There’s the story of Detective Zane trying to get answers from
Sienna, then Alexander’s tragic past flashbacks, then the Doctor’s black
market hospital and Sienna’s survival of the hospital. It just tries
for too much and while the twist ending tries to tie up loose ends, it
just fails. The ending might come as a surprise, but that’s only because
it is so ludicrous.
Making things even more confusing was the editing, which jumps from
past to present randomly and with little explanation. Look, I don’t need
my hand held when watching a film, but the jumpy editing made things
hard to follow and the film really should have been more streamlined.
Plus, who the F cast the kids who are supposed to be some of the
characters as children in flashbacks?? Did no one notice they were
completely different races than the adult characters? It’s called common
sense and continuity, people, and the filmmakers failed on both
accounts!
All of these problems may have been forgiven had there been any
memorable bloodshed in the film, but the gore is all pretty typical.
Well-done, but uninteresting. People who have been infected with a
disease spew up black bile, limbs are hacked off, organs and implants
are cut out, people are shot and so on, but nothing that really stood
out to me. Perhaps I’m just a jaded horror viewer, but none of the gore
in
Sutures grabbed me.
Sutures is a forgettable film that lacks a cohesive
narrative and an engaging story. It’s poorly put together and not even
the gore scenes are memorable. To me, it was a very bland horror flick
with few redeeming qualities. If watching horror flicks about organ
harvesting rings is your thing, then by all means have at it. However,
if you like your horror original, scary and gruesome,
Sutures is not a good match. My body definitely rejected it (nyuck, nyuck!).
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