It
may sound cruel, but you can oftentimes judge the relative quality of a
super-low-budget flick that happens to have a scene set in a strip club
by the class and lithe attractiveness of its pole-dancers. And the girl
writhing around in the opening moments of Live Feed is, um… not
totally the most toned beauty ever to grace screens big or small. If
slightly more comely ladies eventually drop blouse, it hardly makes this
sadistic Hostel rip-off any more stomachable.

Presented, ironically, by Plotdigger Films, Live Feed is written and directed by special effects artist Ryan Nicholson (Torched, Hell Hath No Fury),
with his father Roy sharing a writing and producing credit, because
apparently the family that makes wretched movies together stays
together. To start off on a somewhat positive note, I’ll grant the
movie this allowance: it features some decently unnerving opening
credits, flashes forward into the grisly terrain we’re about to enter.
Unfortunately, it’s almost all downhill from there.

After a group of five Americans (Taayla Markell, Rob Scattergood,
Caroline Chojnacki, Lee Tichon, Ashley Schappert) vacationing in China
disgustedly witness a dog getting carved up, they stumble into a bar —
where they befriend a brooding Japanese man named Miles (Kevan Ohtsji,
coming the closest to acquitting himself), whose quick talking gets
them out of a dust-up with some thugs — and then a sex club owned by
brutal crime boss (Stephen Chang). Here, drugs are done, best friends
are screwed (both figuratively and literally) and time is bided until
the senseless blood-letting commences, much of it at the hands of a
giant, hooded executioner (Mike Bennett), in the fashion of the recent See No Evil.
Shot in nervous, unfocused fashion by cinematographer Sasha Popove
(exterior scenes are strung together with zoom-laden stock footage, and
the later bloody interiors evince no sense of properly delineated
space) and driven forward in sloppy fashion by Patrick Coble’s score, Live Feed
features precious little interior logic, all manner of inane dialogue
and both blood and awful acting by the bucketful. In short, it had me
at the homely stripper and reaffirmed its awfulness with a sequence
where a guy jams a glass pipe down one victim’s throat so that he may
release a snake directly into her esophagus.

Packaged in a regular Amray case, Live Feed is presented in
16×9 widescreen, with interactive menus, scene selection, trailers and
optional Spanish subtitles. Though not on the review copy we were
serviced with, the final release supposedly includes a
behind-the-scenes, making-of featurette, deleted and alternate scenes,
plus an alternate ending. The film is also available in both rated and
unrated versions, and the latter iteration includes a director and cast
audio commentary track and footage from some of the grisly
movies-within-the-movie that Live Feed incorporates. F (Movie) C (Disc, speculatively)