It is possible to intellectualise any cultural phenomenon, however spurious. Vanity Fair ran a feature a couple of years back claiming that Paris Hilton is a cipher, dedicating over five pages of fine print to their argument. And so we are told that ‘torture porn’ is a response to Guantanamo Bay. In this scenario, we construct images of redemptive violence in order to process the inhumanity we implicitly condone. But the thought-police can’t control cinemagoers, and there’s a far simpler message being soaked up by those who dedicate their Saturday night to these films – violence is fun, especially when mixed with sex.
Timber Falls duly follows the adventures of a wholesome couple, Mike and Sheryl (Josh Randall and Brianna Brown), hiking in a national park. After getting down to some alfresco action, they are kidnapped by a religiously fanatical (and procreationally challenged) husband and wife team who force them to marry. They then insist a baby is made for themselves to raise. There’s not a whole lot of tension in this scenario, but there is a lot of suffering to, well, suffer through. Our unfortunate couple spends most of the film in an underground chamber on the wrong end of a range of torture implements.
Director Tony Giglio makes a couple of stabs at meaning and motivation which, although half-hearted, do not go unappreciated in the midst of his movie’s more conventional knife-wielding. And there is a kernel of genuine feeling created between the young lovers. Mike won’t have sex with his new wife while she is drugged and strapped to a hospital bed, showing more compassion than you’d normally find in your average teen comedy, never mind a gore-obsessed horror flick. Giglio also takes a swipe at the institution of marriage, the tyranny of the maternal instinct and the hypocrisy of the Christian Right. But to read too much into the fantastical plot is reaching.
Still, at least one scene nails a heady mix of irony and horror: Sheryl has just revealed she has already conceived out of wedlock, thus scuppering her captors’ plans. One suggests that they give Sheryl an abortion only to be told that they can’t abort a foetus but it’s okay to keep them in jars that line the walls of their dungeon. That’s pretty funny, but it’s a speck of light in an otherwise desperately fogged film.
