It makes
sense that just as I was engaging in a mini-discussion of I Spit On Your Grave on
our message board, the trailer would pop up for Elisha Cuthbert’s second porn
movie, Captivity. Torture porn, that is. Her first being the trashy
and embarrassing/entertaining House of Wax remake. And while I can
argue that Grave holds up an all-too clear mirror to our own enjoyment of
onscreen violence, watching this trailer I’m not sure that Captivity will do
anything other than make most audiences (who will be male — let’s not kid
ourselves) feel a little funny in the pants.
Not so
many weeks ago, many stories ran across the internet describing how four-panel
billboards for the film had been pulled from roadsides in Los Angeles. The ads
in question used a mantra now repeated in the trailer: Abduction. Confinement.
Torture. Execution. Overlaid on rather graphic images, they were more shocking
than what you usually see in public.
The
trailer goes a step further by substituting grand proclamations for any real
content. "The Film They Don’t Want You To See" and "The Movie So
Intense It Was Punished", every word of each slogan thudding onto the
screen in grand AfterEffects style.
The
billboard removal was the first step in the ‘punishment’. The ads had been
posted before approval by the MPAA, which generated an avalanche of complaints
demanding that the film’s R rating be pulled by the MPAA. The agency complied,
pulling the rating and agreeing not to re-rate until at least April 30. As of this posting, the MPAA website doesn’t have a rating listing for the film.
(For more
outrage over the billboards, read RemoveTheRating, Drew McWeeny’s AICN post or Jill
Soloway’s piece at the Huffington Post, all of which mostly say the same
thing.)
If you
can look away from the words, you’ll find nothing but fetishized images of
Elisha Cuthbert, foreboding environments and implications of Truly Bad Things.
And Cuthbert’s breasts and delicate features, of course, here highlighted to
remove any possibility that there might be another reason to see the movie.
Then there’s the sexy little hitched gasp Cuthbert emits after asking ‘Are you
going to kill me?’, the clip’s only dialogue.
The clip
is available in HD (of course — don’t miss a detail!) on Yahoo. I guess you
could click here to watch it if you really want to.