So the trailer for Captivity, the Roland Joffé film that created an uproar with its controversial marketing scheme and subsequent slapdown by the MPAA, has dropped online and in select theaters, and it does little to dissuade those that have argued passionately that Eli Roth‘s recent Hostel: Part II is indicative of the cultural highway to hell that this country is on. It’s “torture porn,” with flesh in a blender, goosing screams with little (apparent) sense of identification, yadda yadda yadda…

Look, the way these movies are marketed and the stark reality of them are two different things entirely. To me, The Hills Have Eyes and, most of all, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning are much more emblematic of the new stalking cinema of sadism, because they have so much more less to say than Roth’s Hostel flicks. The jury is still out and the book is still open on Captivity, meanwhile. Joffé (The Killing Fields) is a talented director, but he can succumb to laziness, and on the surface this has the scent of a paycheck job, like Boaz Yakin doing Uptown Girls or Wayne Wang doing Last Holiday. Elisha Cuthbert, who I really liked in the underrated The Girl Next Door — and not merely because she was playing a porn star, you hornballs — shows me nothing really special here, but the trailer is selling gore, not nuance. (Meanwhile, I guess armpit fetishists can dig on the above photo.) Uh oh… just noticed that Pruitt Taylor Vince (Heavy, Identity) is in the movie. That can only mean one thing, really. Well… one of two things, each related to one another.

UPDATE 7/18: For a full review of the movie, click here.