User Reviews

Well I must admit to expecting not a lot from this movie however it turned out to be pretty good overall. A couple of small niggles here and there but what movie doesn't have them?

On with the review! Okay so the movie starts off as pretty much standard stuff, nothing really being given away and it ticks along at quite a sedate pace right up to the actual landmine makes it's appearance. Then the movie immediately grabbed my interest and kept it right up to the very well performed ending.

The movie does a great job of keeping the viewers on their toes due in most part to the changing pace, location and fully committed characters.

**Possible spoiler alert here** I think the only real disappointment was that one of the main characters disappears from the movie and never returns throughout. Not unexplained just a little too convenient

The final scene of the movie makes the whole thing worth watching regardless of how you felt about the rest of it.

Personally I found it enjoyable

I must admit I normally do not write reviews ever.. This might be my 2nd one in my life? I felt obligated as this movie does not merit a high rating at all. There was absolutely no creativity or thought to this film. It was extremely predictable and beyond simple.. I question Levan Bakhia's upbringing to decide on creating a very simplistic film that is just sick. Did you really need to have over a 1minute rape scene? Not to mention how much time was wasted getting there when the audience was well aware it was already bound to happen.

This film is not terrifying, it is not a thriller, it has absolutely no twists and was a waste of time and money and a horrible way to try and start a career with his 2nd feature film.

Simple synopsis. Man stuck on landmine, yet they admit in the film that landmines are triggered on pressure down, not on release of pressure, so it obviously is fake, woman nearby to help, random foreigner comes by knowing man is stuck on landmine thus rapes woman to leave man alive to have him do the same idea to his daughter. boring sick and no creativity. Good luck on your career. Also must note that those who gave awards have no merit to future films.

I suppose Chris was to be seen as the victim.

but him terrorizing and murdering an innocent girl who had NOTHING to do with her sicko father's deeds

was just wrong....

Well, what a surprise this one turned out to be. The first half of the film centres around the lead male being confined to standing on a landmine courtesy of his so called best mate, who having found out he'd been sleeping with his woman decided to play a practical joke on him. Things turn mightily sour when a local rambler turns up on the scene and starts to get quite unpleasant via the playing of a slightly sadistic game. Up to this point you can be forgiven for thinking this is going to be another run of the mill horror/revenge film with a sprinkling of female revenge as per "I Spit On Your Grave" (albeit not nearly as good). What happens mid movie however changes this and we are left to view revenge from the angle of the male who was stood on the landmine. The ending is quite shocking, not least in it's content but I particularly liked the way the camera remains fixed on the lead character even when you expect to see other things going on and this amplifies the moment of revenge and leaves the viewer considering who ultimately is the greater of the two evils (the rambler or the landmine guy) and one is left with a sour taste in the mouth as the credits roll. Definitely worth the watch.

***NO SPECIFIC PLOT OR STORY SPOILERS, BUT STRONG ADVICE GIVEN DUE TO MY FEELINGS ABOUT ENDING---FYI***

I don't think I have ever utterly despised a movie I watched in its entirety as much as this tale of revenge and inhumanity ending in the most cruel and heartless scene I have ever witnessed in film. I felt something suddenly die in me in one instant, and I don't think it has come back yet. The movie hooks you effectively enough with the plot device mentioned in the title, and pulls you along for a while by gradually raising the stakes and building suspense, keeping the viewer rooting for seemingly decent enough people, who may or may not be.

Sooner or later, the viewer will finally ask him or herself "how the h*ll did I wade this far into sheer cr@p???", and suddenly, before you can make your exit -- it will be too late. And you will regret what you have seen for the rest of your life. Please, PLEASE, do not be tempted to go here. Or if you must, do so, but you may trust me forever after.

On the basis that this movie has made a lasting, unshakable, impression on me, I am giving it two stars, though my logic on this choice is open to debate.

With a title like that I was expecting complete schlock but I was mesmerized by this movie from the second act. It starts out silly but becomes more and more insane as it goes on. However implausible the plot gets I remained glued to my seat. However there were a few points that strained credulity and a few loose ends that were not tied up at all. Such as the fate of the boyfriend or how Ilya escaped what was sure to be an international manhunt. It seems that the third act takes place after some time has passed, giving ample time to put either of the two characters behind bars for the crime. Then there's the idea that Chris would go that far for revenge when he seemed to be a sweet kid at the beginning. His actions are more characteristic of the boyfriend than what he would do. And the boyfriend never appears again! However I still found the film so interesting and had to comment on it.

Did I mention the theme I get from this film is Revenge?

So as others have written the movie opens with 3 friends backpacking around the Republic of Georgia (Ex USSR Country on the European Asian border). Chris, Dan and Alicia As the opening dialogues commence it becomes apparent that two of the couple are engaged to be married (Dan and Alicia) and one assumes the third (Chris) is the Best Man. As the dialogue continues we are told the Best Man Chris and the Wife to be Alicia slept together and that the Chris has real feelings for the Alicia.

During a routine photo shoot of local scenery the Chris stands on a landmine, and that this is a deliberate act by Dan as revenge for sleeping with the Alicia. The revenge is amplified with fake telephone calls for help after the wife to be is told emergency services don't rescue whores.

After the Dan leaves the scene a passerby a local Georgian man Ilya walking his dog and hunting becomes aware of their plight, during the dialogue he learns the circumstances because he has hunted their all his life and knows there are no landmine's that it was a deliberate act and its because in his words she is a whore.

As the afternoon progresses Ilya forces Alicia to play out his sexual fantasies having her act like dog playing fetch with her underwear and making her bring them back in her mouth in order to gain favours for his 2 way radio to get help. Ultimately it ends a brutal rape of Alicia and then a fight for the gun.

At the end the passerby's dog jumps on the stranded Chris still trapped on the landmine and we learn it was a fake all along. But the gun discharges and shoots Alicia.

We then switch to a coastal house which belongs to the Ilya and his family, the Chris who was trapped on the landmine claims to be a tourist and is looking for a map when Ilya comes back he realises what's going on and demands Chris to leave. Unknowing of what's gone on before Ilya's wife and daughter insists that Chris should stay for the meal.

After the meal there is a discussion between Ilya and Chris. They agree to meet an hour later to discuss everything. But an unspecified time later we see Chris returning carrying the dying body of the dog.

Then he shoots Ilya in both knee caps before re-enacting all the sexual fantasies played out whilst he was trapped on the landmine. Finally we finish with Russian roulette 1 bullet in a gun he says Ilya's daughter should strip and every time Chris fires the gun she must take an item of clothing off - (she already took off her jumper and panties), so she only has about 2 items of clothing and odds of 5-1 she won't get shot.

Chris fires 1 shot with the gun - the 1 chamber with the bullet kills the daughter. We close with Chris shocked and withdrawn in a corner.

I get what they're going for here. I'm a horror nut and this premise was too juicy to pass up when scanning through my streaming apps. I'm on board with the shock-value horror aesthetic, I've seen Human Centipede a dozen times and I admired what Last House on the Left was trying to do. Landmine Goes Click is a great premise wrapped in extremely questionable filmmaking choices. It starts out like an okay Twilight Zone (or Saw, for that matter) story. Lots of people here are pointing out the problems with the brutalization of women (which I'll get to), but I understand where the filmmakers are coming from. They're not saying that the characters were right in brutalizing the only female characters. They were trying to show that our protagonist's troubles earlier in the film turned him into just as much of a monster as our original antagonist. In seeking revenge, the hero became a much worse villain than the villain ever was. If that was the point, then I get it and it's even a good idea (even if overused) for a revenge movie. The problem I have with the execution is that we never feel sorry for the women.

**SPOILERS** We feel terrible for Chris because he's unable to save Alicia. Sure, we feel bad for her too but we're focused on Chris and how he had to endure watching her get raped and carrying her body and listening to her die. We are supposed to see that the antagonist is suffering because he has to watch his daughter get abused. I'm really, really not the person who points to every movie and asks why the female characters are just used as props, but this movie broke me in that respect. There are 3 women in the film and every single one is used as a device and torture target to inflict emotional pain on a male character. I said that the filmmakers made questionable choices. One of these was using rape as a plot device to show the audience how tough Chris' trouble was. Of course we're supposed to feel Alicia's pain, too, but only insofar as it makes us reflect on what we would do if we were in Chris' shoes. In the same way, I found myself kind of rooting for Chris to brutalize the family at the end, and I choose to blame that on the filmmakers rather than my own sick desires for revenge. I'll also say that a 3-minute rape sequence filled with vivid sounds that does not cut away and zooms in to make sure we can see just how much Alicia is in pain and makes sure we can see she's crying real tears, is a little much for me. Most people don't recognize gunshots in a real-world shooting scenario because Hollywood has tricked us into thinking they sound louder and fuller than they actually do. This rape scene was like filming a gunfight with no quick-cuts, no embellished gunshot sounds, no overuse of blood. It's too real to feel any normal cinematic escapism. Instead, I feel like I'm watching a real person get raped. I did not enjoy that. I didn't necessarily enjoy watching what's her face get killed in Scream either, but it was done with purposeful cinematic staging so it was entertaining. I liked watching Scream much more than I would like watching a snuff film where real people get slashed to death. That was my problem with this rape scene. **/SPOILERS**

I can enjoy shocking horror, gore, and brutality. I can overlook and understand movies that don't have great cinematography or dialog. What I take exception with in this movie was that it tried way too hard to get the audience to understand the real-world emotional pain of the characters in a not- at-all escapist way. The Human Centipede (not a film to hold as a measure of all cinema, I know) was shocking but over the top in a way that disconnected us from the characters emotionally. Sure, we still felt for the characters. Same with Last House on the Left, we still came away with an ache in our stomachs, but the impact was dampened because of the use of devices that disconnect us from what was on the screen. Landmine Goes Click gets too real, too quickly, and in all the wrong ways. I don't need to watch movies that shock me in ways that evoke real feelings of disgust at actual horrors in the real world. Are there serial killers and chainsaw-wielding psychos in the world? Sure. But Friday 13th and Scream have a level of disbelief built into them that this movie lacks. Serial killers are like the boogie man, so making them the baddies of movies is like fantasy. Making an alcoholic rapist the bad guy is like making a movie about Ebola where we spend 2 hours watching an 8 year old girl slowly die of diarrhea. It's far too real to be entertainment. If I want to watch a vivid depiction of the types of brutality that dirty old men can inflict on young, pretty girls, I'll watch the news. Instead, I wanted to watch some escapism horror that let's me satisfy the sick parts of my brain with blood and terror and, sure, even brutal violence against women if the script calls for it, and all the other things that skilled writers and directors know how to put on screen without giving their audience anxiety over how easily men have preyed on women since the dawn of time. It's like they wanted to make a powerful movie about the horrors of forgotten buried explosives (it's a real problem- children get blown up all of the time), a snuff film about brutal manipulation and rape, and a horror/suspense revenge flick. Instead the filmmakers just sewed all three together so that they share one digestive tract. The end result was the same: crap from beginning to end.