Derivative, cheapjack formula nauseates instead of intrigues...

Rating: 4/10 (1 April 2006)

A doctor and a shady photographer awaken in a filthy bathroom, both of them chained to pipes, with a dead body between them and two saws at their disposal; they try piecing together their predicament, why they've been kidnapped and what their captor wants them to do (hint: he's into teaching people Life Appreciation--the hard way). Might've been strong as a short, but too much of this is padding (what with flashbacks, parting shots, and the subplot with the inept police). What's left over is alternately engrossing, stupid, shameless (the psycho threatening the little girl), and tiresome. Cary Elwes plays the bland, indifferent doctor who gets a radical change to his outlook, and he's admirable despite being at the center of a movie cesspool; Shawnee Smith, in a bit as a drug-addict who once survived the madman, has the film's only real suspenseful sequence. *1/2 from ****