Love Hurts

This is a very curious movie. It's meant to be a sinister horror/thriller, with an eccentric who invites a group of random persons for a dinner party in his mansion, under the pretense that they will be paid 10.000 dollar if they will experience an "emotional breakthrough". Then, in the course of the evening, he starts provoking them, playing with their minds and revealing some of their hidden personal secrets. This causes some of them to snap and totally lose control; as a result eventually blood flows, and worse.

This may sound interesting, and is does have potential, but the execution is really bad. The pace is way too slow, the photography is lackluster, and especially the acting is below every par. Only the host (Sean Sprawling) and his butler (Simon Phillips) do a good job, but the actors playing the guests are all terrible. The script is very talkative, and the whole movie is very low on action.

Biggest let-down is the lack of any comprehensible or relatable motive for the host (or for his commissioner, as a twist at the end of the movie reveals) for their actions. The interrogation by the two police-detectives doesn't really help in getting answers, they are so awkward and amateurish that the result is hardly surprising.

In fact, my only positive feeling concerns Sean Sprawling: as the gender-fluid androgynous host his (their) attitude, gestures and dialogues are almost theatrically choreographed, and lend him (them) a definite, larger than life charisma. But that alone wasn't enough to save this disappointing project.