ROGUE RIVER

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

The dispiriting thing about this abduction/torture film is just how unremarkable it is. Are we all tortured out? No-one can reasonably expect dazzling originality and innovation from every movie that comes down the river, but it would be nice if the pendulum swung back the other way once in a while.

More than forty miles from the nearest town, Rogue River is a remote and unspoiled beauty spot that Mara (Michelle Page) selects to scatter her father's ashes. Local Jon (Bill Moseley - and surely that's a tipoff to the madness to come) is initially friendly in that downhome out-in-the-sticks kind of a way but once he's managed to get her into his house it transpires that he and his wife Lea (Lucinda Jenney) and out and out screaming lunatics. Gosh. Who'd have thought?

The reasons behind Mara's incarceration and suffering as implausible and unfathomable as you'd expect, and really aren't important, although they do contain a few new medicinally-enhanced wrinkles. But it isn't long before it resorts to the usual running and ranting and shooting and screaming. Rogue River isn't terrible - it's just a perfectly well made example of something that's been perfectly well made so many times before, and indeed better. And despite it looking great and everyone doing a decent job, the end result is sadly unremarkable.

**