Cold Sweat

We've all fallen for the awesome trailer trick before. If you're into movies at all, at some point and time, you're going to see a trailer that looks absolutely amazing, and you're going to make seeing that particular movie your new mission in life. Sometimes the flick ends up being everything you hoped it would be, sometimes even more than you'd hoped....but every now and then you sit down to watch the movie and right away you realize things aren't playing out like you'd hoped, and before you know it the movie is over and you're just left with yet another of life's disappointments. Maybe it was the movie, maybe it was you, maybe you just didn't get it, but whatever the case, the end result is the same, disappointment. Case in point, Cold Sweat. I saw the trailer and loved it, in fact I was probably looking forward to seeing it  more than anything else I'm currently keeping an eye on. I finally got a chance to check it out this weekend, and well, as I'm sure you've guessed by now, I didn't really like it.

It's almost impossible to really talk about this movie without giving away spoilers, as the trailer does very little to give you an idea as to what exactly is going on. I'm going to attempt to go into as little detail plot-wise as possible, but I will have to give away a little bit of the overall goings-on. Cold Sweat ends up being yet another torture flick, only one with a plot so ridiculous that I honestly can't believe anybody ever thought this was a good idea. Again, maybe I just didn't get it. I've said plenty of times before, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer.  Basically, fed up with the youth today, two elderly ex-political extremists are using the internet to lure people to their house, where they use acid, nitro-glycerine, and other methods to torture them. Why do they torture them? Because apparently the average young person's vocabulary only includes around 200 words. That's the only explanation we get as to why they're doing what they're doing.

When Cold Sweat begins, Roman and a friend of his have tracked his ex-girlfriend down, looking for an explanation as to why she ended their relationship. She had apparently been chatting with someone on the internet, and ended things with her Roman in the hopes of pursuing a budding internet relationship. As it turns out, you guessed it, the person she had been chatting with was really one of the old guys, and when she arrived at the house, she was taken down to the basement and slathered in a healthy coating of nitro-glycerine. Probably for her lack of vocabulary or some nonsense such as that. So our hero Roman risks life and limb to rescue this person who had every intention of breaking his heart and leaving him for some stranger she met online. Dude's a better person than I am.

Ridiculously stupid plot aside, there were a couple of things I actually liked about the movie, don't want to be completely negative here. There was some decent cinematography on display. I liked a couple of shots, particularly a slow motion look at what happens when a bottle of nitro gets tossed through the air and makes contact with someone's chest in a small hallway with three or four other people standing around. It was gloriously messy. I also liked when they found all the other women who had been victims of the torture, although they had a really limited screen time, they ended up being my favorite part of the movie. What can I say? I'm a sucker for cellar dwellers.

Otherwise though, Cold Sweat didn't really do anything for me. Normally when I sit down with a Dark Sky Films release, I feel pretty confident that I'm in good hands, this time I was pretty let down. They can't all be winners I guess. With so many superior flicks out there in the genre, it's hard to recommend Cold Sweat to anyone other than the most devoted of torture porn addicts. The rest of us may as well keep walking.