Sadistic crap that doesn't earn its graphic content

Rating: 1/10 (2 September 2016)

*General spoilers*
I have to be that person and preface this by saying that I'm hardly ever squeamish about movie violence, sexual or otherwise. Just sticking to Sam Raimi's work, I was fine with Evil Dead and greatly enjoyed Spartacus, which seemed to have a rape scene every other episode. But those traded on something other than pure exploitation; Evil Dead had decent characters and was creative for its time, and Spartacus had drama and an at times moving story.
Don't Breathe makes the vaguest attempt at giving its characters, well, character traits: the girl has an extraordinarily cliché motivation that is handled very badly, and the longer-surviving boy is in love with her, so that's a thing? You don't have any reason to actually give a d*mn about the characters, so watching them suffer is about on the same level as watching an animal be tortured- -just pointless cruelty. The portrayal of the blind man is utterly ridiculous; he's bestial and inarticulate, adding to the movie's bizarre inhuman quality. When you get to the climactic confrontation between him and the female lead--I've never asked this before, but what kind of actor and actress would consent to play a scene like this? There's f-ed up, and then there's did-you-have- your-soul-replaced-with-dog-crap. No one in the theater was reacting well by this point. You can tell the difference between scared-but-thrilled and repelled and disgusted.
And then there's the fact that this movie is racist. Again, that's not a card that I play very often, but how are we supposed to interpret a portrayal of Detroit whose only black citizen is a sexist, dimwitted thief who exists to die within ten minutes? "Black guy dies first" is the oldest cliché in the book; HOW do movies keep doing it? They could have at least made him the slightly-cool one that doesn't deserve what happens, but nope; a single sympathetic character is too much to ask for, obviously.
As if all of the above weren't enough, the movie's ending dragged ON and ON, taking any suspense it had managed to achieve and running it into the ground. You don't want the audience's reaction to your jump scares to be "oh, for f's sake", but that's the tone I was getting from my fellow moviegoers as we toggled endlessly between man is back/dog is back/man is back/dog is back. I only stayed til the end because my roommate objected to walking out and wasting her money. I haven't seen anything this terrible in years, if not my whole life. Give it a big fat miss and go watch literally any other horror movie. Some of them are great. This is utter trash.