With the October Horror Challenge taking place on the IMDb Horror board,I decided to take a look at film maker Lamberto Bava's IMDb page,where I discovered that Bava had made a torturer horror which appears to have not come out on non-Italian DVD.Talking to a DVD seller,I was pleased to discover that he had recently tracked down the movie,which led to me getting ready to face the torture.The plot:Auditioning for the latest film from underground director Alex Scerba, aspiring actress Ginette Cazonni is taken by Scerba's charms,and ends up having a one night stand with him.Getting set to leave his place, Ginette finds an ear ring which looks just like the ones that her missing friend Marzia Foster used to wear.Fearing that something has happened to Foster, Cazonni starts to investigate and discovers that before she disappeared,Foster had auditioned for Scerba.Breaking into Scerba's house, Cazonni soon finds Foster and makes a torturous discovery.View on the film:Stabbing the torturer horror set pieces,co-writer/(along with Diego Cestino/Luciano Martino/Dardano Sacchetti/Michele Massimo Tarantini & Andrea Valentini) director Lamberto Bava and cinematographer Ugo Menegatti drizzles the sequence in stylish silver which allow for the blood to burst across the screen.Stepping out of the torture chamber,Bava clouds Ginette (played by a cute Elena Bouryka,who also appears naked) in moody low-lighting,which thanks to shooting the film on grainy digital,gives the title an unexpectedly icy Gothic atmosphere.Displaying a desire to stray away from the torture horror foundations,the writers attempt to give the film a Giallo bite in the search for the missing Foster,which sadly dries up due to the title having to go back to the gore.Whilst they are unable to torture the Giallo,the writers give the terror a sly satirical edge,as each of the actresses sees the gory acts as the demands of a "sadistic" director,as the torturer gets tortured.

The twenty-four year-old aspirant actress Ginette Cazonni (Elena Bouryka) goes to an audition with the underground director Alex Scerba (Simone Corrente) and they have one night stand. Ginette finds one earring identical to the one that belongs to her friend Marzia Foster that has been missing for three days on the stage and keeps it with her. Alex invites Ginette to go to his studio and they go to an isolated house where she meets Alex's deranged mother and his stepfather and producer, but soon Ginette returns home. When she calls Marzia again, she learns that her friend had also gone to an audition with Alex and has never returned home. Ginette suspects that Alex might have abducted her friend and she decides to break in Alex's parental house to investigate and to find Marzia's fate. Meanwhile three other women go to the theater to have an audition with Alex and they are tortured. Will Ginette have the same destiny of the other women? "The Torturer" is a trash combination of giallo with exploitation by Lamberto Bava with sexy women and torture. The stupid story shows female characters that are dumb sluts and the identity of the torturer is totally predictable. The Russian model Elena Bouryka is very hot and makes the film worthy with her sensuality and erotic scenes. The DVD released in Brazil does not have the original Italian audio and is awfully dubbed in English. My vote is five. Title (Brazil): "A Tortura" ("The Torture")

My favorite director of all time is Mario Bava. As such, I have a guilty admiration for the movies of his less-talented son, Lamberto. Lamberto has a pretty leaden eye when it comes to film-making, and really he has only a couple of quality films on his resume.The Torturer is his attempt to make a torture-horror type movie, and he does so in a pretty straightforward fashion. An insane villain tricks women into coming to his deserted studio for "acting tryouts" and then he gets them to climb inside scary boxes and such, and then he tortures them to death.The torture is a little gory, but it's actually less impressive than the kind of stuff we used to see in the 60s, with films such as the Coffin Joe series. The cheesecake isn't bad (if there's one thing Italian films do right, it's having attractive women), but you don't really see anything X-rated. And not enough of the R-rated, if you're a fan.The plot does manage to thicken a little in the last 20 minutes of the film, and some interesting action takes place. Bava, presumably to save money, set most of the film in one single set which looks suspiciously like a normal movie studio. Bava almost always makes one horrible misstep somewhere in each of his movies. In this one, it is the conceit that the demented killer stays hidden from view for most of the movie - he's just a voice over a speaker. And there is no reason for this - his identity is not a secret - he's just a madman. But it removes any chance for the characters to interact.The Italian cinema has decayed mightily since its glory days in the 1970s. I respect Bava for trying to bring it back even with this no-budget exploitation trash. So for that reason, if no other, I recommend the movie.

Good old Lamberto Bava - he may not have the film-making talent of his father, but you can always count on him to come up with something sleazy and violent! That's exactly what he's done here, as although The Torturer is pretty crap really, it's graphic and violent enough to please fans of this sort of stuff (people like me, then). In true Italian style, The Torturer would appear to be Lamberto's way of cashing on the successful snuff-themed films of late, which includes the likes of Saw. It would seem that he didn't really have time to come up with a viable plot in his rush to rip these successful films off, and the result is a more than somewhat lacking thriller. The film focuses on a casting director, who gets beautiful but dumb as two short planks girls down to his studio for their auditions. The auditions he gives aren't exactly orthodox, although the girls don't seem to mind much until he starts to brutally torture them! We then focus on one slightly smarter girl who gets wind of what is going on.The cinematography is glossy, but the film very much feels like it was made for television (except for all the blood and gore). This low quality feel goes on throughout the film, and while this same thing has often gone on to make several seventies films more of a blast; somehow the same just doesn't apply to most modern day films. The torture scenes are fairly good, however, and without doubt the most realistic thing about the film. Most of it feels fairly standard, but there is a sequence involving a nipple piercing that is bound to make some viewers squirm! Lamberto Bava seems to have an eye for the ladies, however, and the film isn't exactly short on buxom women for the slaughter! The actresses auditioned by the casting director are extremely nice to look at, and this bodes well with the ghoulish torture sequences! Most of the film is nothing to write home about (at all), but one thing that stood out for me was the music played while the torture is going on - Bava proves that heavy rock can sometimes be just right! Overall, I can't recommend this film really - but it's not too bad, and it's likely to entertain anyone with a will to track it down.