It was probably inevitable that someone would take the last reel of Last House on the Left – in which nice middle-class parents are goaded into committing unspeakable violence by the rape and murder of their daughter – and use it as the premise for a whole movie. Well, the opportunist-ically-titled The Tortured does just that, giving us a couple who take the law into their own hands by abducting their young son’s killer and doing terrible things to him with surgical instruments. While the inversion of usual roles – it’s the ‘good guys’ doling out the protracted and graphic abuse – should raise some interesting moral issues, these are pretty much explored in the movie’s crass tagline of “How Far Would You Go?” Director Robert Lieberman’s background is in television, and stylist-ically he’s barely made the leap to the big screen, relying on mawkish flashbacks to enliven the film’s bland visual texture and attempt to make us care for its unconvincing protagonists. Every conceivable cliché is used to characterise the child-killer (a laughable mélange of Hitchcockian and Argento-esque tropes, from lullabies on the soundtrack to creepy toys and stuffed animals in his shack), and a meaningless twist thrown in for good measure. Dispiriting stuff on every level.