Sunday, March 9, 2014

Blu-ray Review: SCORNED (2014)

SCORNED (2014) 

Label: Anchor Bay Entertainment
Region: A
Duration: 86 Minutes
Rating: R
Audio: English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 with Optional English, Spanish Subtitles 
Video: 1080 Widescreen (1.78:1) 
Director: Mark Jones
Cast: Viva Bianca, Billy Zane, AnnaLynne McCord 

Scorned (2014) is a straight-to-video thriller starring the arguably once popular Billy Zane (Demon Knight) and the gorgeous AnnaLynne McCord who I thought was quite good in the body-horror indie Excision (2012) as a disturbed young woman with surgical aspirations and menstrual sex fantasties. Here McCord is yet again a disturbed young woman though the her character Sadie is much less intriguing though just as dangerous, a manic nut off her lithium at a time when she discovers her douche-nozzle boyfriend Kevin (Zane) is fucking her slutty best-friend (Viva Bianca). On a romantic weekend getaway things turn ugly quickly when Sadie intercepts  a few choice texts on Kevin's phone.  The story is set in motion pretty fast and we get a few missing pieces through ridiculous flashbacks to hours before and a fucked-up childhood - it's a bit of a mess.


Incapacitating Kevin she then lures her former-bestie to the country getaway where she quickly gets the upper hand before subjecting both to a series of psycho-sexual torture games. None of it's overly graphic but it does get a bit ridiculous with finger-breaking, electrocution and forced oral pleasuring. Throw in a sub-plot about an escaped murderer from the local prison in the area and it's just a bit too much, the tortures are so thought out that it's hard to believe she came up with this on the spot and the characters are all so unsympathetic you cannot get behind any of them, you feel absolutely nothing for anyone in this movie. 


A very vanilla thriller that is thankfully quite short at just 86 minutes. I tend to steer clear of Billy Zane projects but after Excision I had high-hopes for McCord but this is a disappointment from start to finish, the writing is lackluster and this is just a very workman-like production with little to no atmosphere or suspense. The Blu-ray looks decent in the AV department but there are no extras on the disc - not even the cast and crew would care to reminisce about the making of this limp thriller.  2 Outta 5