Hitchhikers Are Still Bad, Right?

OK, I'll totally admit that I watched Vile out of a Face-Off fanboy moment.  I saw McKenzie Westmore's name and I said, "Oh, hey.  We know she's kinda stiff as a presenter.  Let's see if her acting is as wooden as those fashionable wedges she wears."

Well?  Fortunately, she doesn't show up a lot and, for what it's worth, she's actually funny in this one but they gave her close to top billing for a part that lasts less than ten minutes.  YAY, marketing.

Anyway, I can tell you that the people who hate torture porn will ABHOR this movie because that's all it is from start to finish.  The story goes like this:  Kids are on the way back home from a camping trip when they pick up a hitchhiker (Westmore) who gasses them.  They wake up in a cabin whereupon scary mad scientist lady shows up on a screen and tells them that they have vials attached to the back of their heads that must be filled with a certain chemical that the brain produces in 22 hours.  This chemical is produced when the human body is subjected to extreme pain.

Science is MAAAAAAAAAgiiiiic!

Right there, this told me that this flick is gonna be more wince-incuding than a towel-whip to the gonads.  I didn't know if it was gonna hit or not but, damn, if I didn't flinch.

I was pleasantly surprised, though.  The film had a little bite to it.  It's more along that whole "man's inhumanity to man" thing, but it wasn't forced.  It flowed smoothly between "we HAVE to do this" to a few characters that were "we WANT to do this" and one character that was just too hot to handle.  Every cast has to have a douchebag. 

And some casts consist ONLY of douchebags.

There's some genuine tenderness between a few of the cast members, though and this is what brings Vile a few notches above your standard low-budget torture porn.  And there are a few twists along the way, as well.  One of the characters is pregnant so they have to figure out how to harvest from her without hurting her TOO badly, for example.

Ultimately, though, this movie is enjoyable but it's only a notch or two above "I just graduated from Tom Savini's School of Special Effects and my mommy bought me a camera".  Vile is so full of burns, punctures, slashes, missing fingernails, black eyes and cauliflower ears that it may as well have been filmed at a wife beaters convention.  That, on top of the fairly ludicrous "black market brain chemicals" angle, makes it ostensibly silly.  I enjoyed it but we all know I'm a sick motherfucker, don't we?

If anything, I say give it a try.  Hearing an attractive SyFy reality show presenter yelling "fucking rednecks" should make you chuckle.