The Poughkeepsie Tapes

 2/4

Starring: Stacy Chbosky, Ben Messmer, Lou George, Ivar Brogger

Rated R for Sadistic Violence and Torture, including Graphic Images and Descriptions

I had to sit and think for a while in order to form a coherent opinion about "The Poughkeepsie Tapes."  On the one hand, it does what it sets out to do.  It is a violent and intense film.  It did indeed unsettle me.  On the other, the film is so brutal, so disturbing and so cruel that watching it feels like an exercise in masochism.

"The Poughkeepsie Tapes" is a faux-documentary about the attempts to catch a serial killer who would later be dubbed "The Water Street Butcher."  He has no consistent M.O., defy attempts to profile him, and he is impossible to catch.  Meanwhile, the body count keeps rising all over Pennsylvania, and his victims range from prostitutes to a couple that unwisely picks up a "hitchhiker" to a little girl playing on her front lawn.  Interspersed with the "interviews" of people connected to the case are excerpts from the 1000+ tapes he made of himself stalking, torturing and murdering his victims.

This is a tough movie to review.  John Eric Dowdle seeks to do more than create a simple geek show or pointless brutality like in "Revenge of the Green Dragons."  He sets out to tell a story as a documentary and he succeeds on that level.  The plot is engaging (if at times contrived) and as unpleasant as the film gets, I wanted to know how things were going to turn out.

However, the film's violence is so horrific and the acting is so powerful that it creates a paradox.  It's so extreme that it casts a pall on the rest of the film.  The snuff films feel like real snuff films.  I felt like I was watching real women being brutalized.  It is not pleasant.  There is one scene where a stranded woman gets a ride from who she thinks is a police officer and slowly realizes that she's been abducted by a serial killer.  Watching her beg for her life and try to escape nearly had me in tears because Dowdle never cuts away until we see the final result.  And it wasn't the good kind of crying like in "Titanic" or "Atonement." It was the kind of crying that came when your parents showed you "Saving Private Ryan" when you were five.

Horror films by their nature push all kinds of buttons and make us uncomfortable, but "The Poughkeepsie Tapes" goes too far.  Maybe it's that the acting goes not for drama but gut-churning realism.  These women don't scream like Jennifer Love Hewitt in "I Know What You Did Last Summer."  They scream like they're being tortured and threatened with their lives.  It is really sickening.

The film has a strange history.  It was originally slated to be released in 2007, and the trailer was attached to a number of horror films at the time.  It even got a rating from the MPAA, echoing the curious fate of "Shanghai," which had a similar fate (side note: the R rating is wholly inappropriate.  If there is a movie that deserves an NC-17, it's this).  But it was pulled from release and sat on a shelf for seven year until it was released on demand and given a Blu Ray release by Shout! Factory.  How such a thing is possible is easy to guess: someone actually watched it and realized that there was no way this film could have made a profit with a traditional release structure.  It's too brutal for mainstream fare.  Even by the torture porn standards established by "Saw" and its contemporaries (including "The Collector," which was also directed by Dowdle), this is extreme.  Even "Martyrs" didn't go this far.

So after spilling out all of my thoughts on this movie, what am I left with?  I'm not sure.  I don't know how I feel about this movie.  I did appreciate the craftsmanship of Dowdle and his crew.  They accomplished what they set out to do and created a frightening film that got under my skin.  But I also cannot deny that the film made me feel really bad.  I wanted to turn it off just to make it stop.

Again, I can look at this film and appreciate that Dowdle did what he set out to do, but I can't recommend the film.  It's just so violent and cruel that it goes beyond horror and into overkill.  A big part of me wishes I hadn't seen it.  Having said that, I can say that I saw it and that I never want to see it again.

Ever.

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