[yasr_overall_rating]
Zack Connors and Rachel Meadows were born with incredible psychokinetic capabilities. When word of their supernatural talents gets out, they find themselves prisoners of Michael Slovak, a deranged doctor intent on harvesting their powers.
If there’s one genre besides Westerns that has completely fallen by the wayside in modern cinema – the recent “Magnificent Seven” remake notwithstanding – it is unquestionably horror. Long gone is the heyday of Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. Vampires have become tween icons, werewolves are now high school lacrosse players, and zombie outbreaks are often little more than plot devices used to drive social commentary. It would make sense, then, for some enterprising filmmaker to breathe life into a genre that sorely needs it. There’s many different potential angles: a found footage flick, a la “The Blair Witch Project”, or an action-packed thriller in the vein of “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” What director and writer Joe Begos seeks to resurrect with “The Mind’s Eye” however, is torture porn derived from the hackneyed “Saw” franchise. This is not an approach that serves his project well.
“The Mind’s Eye” is built on a relatively simple premise: there are hundreds of Americans with telekinetic powers, and the malevolent doctor Michal Slovak (John Speredakos) seeks to exploit those powers for his own personal benefit. Two of his most powerful patients (portrayed by Graham Skipper and Lauren Carter) escape the facility where they are being held, and Dr. Slovak seeks to hunt them down and make them pay for their insolence. Speredakos succeeds in conveying Slovak’s psychopathic tendencies, but the other performances are nothing to write home about. Honestly though, the cookie-cutter characters and familiar plot are secondary to this film’s real purpose: filling the run time with so much blood and gore that you become desensitized to it entirely.
“Saw” pushed boundaries when it was released in 2004. That and the ensuing installments were so influential, in fact, that they spawned an entirely new sub-genre of horror known as “torture porn.” One could easily create an X-Y graph showing the decline of the originality axis and the ascendance of the gore axis to get a good idea about where exactly that particular film franchise ended up heading. While artistic shock value is nothing new, an entire sub-genre based on shock value is as postmodern as it gets. “The Mind’s Eye” checks all the right boxes of extreme brutality to fit into this group. I will say this for Begos: the gratuitous violence certainly looks realistic enough.
I am sure there are some horror fans out there who might legitimately enjoy this film. And there’s nothing wrong with that – again, shock value as art is a longstanding tradition. I personally derive no enjoyment out of works such as these, but that doesn’t preclude others from doing so. “The Mind’s Eye” isn’t necessarily sub-par, and the production value is actually rather impressive. Where it fails, though, is in its inability to bring anything remotely fresh to a genre in dire need of just that. Evil doctor? Seen it before. Telekinetic protagonists? You might win style points, but there’s little depth to them. Over-the-top blood and gore? Yawn. There’s little here that indicates much of a creative process, and for me, torture porn is a quintessentially early 2000s phenomenon that ought to just stay there. Unfortunately, it looks as if horror’s revival will have to wait a little bit longer.
Available on Blu-ray & DVD October 4th
