Five friends are on vacation in a Chinese city when they one night decides to go to a Kareoke Bar. In there, one of the friends happens to offend a Triad boss, but luckily a Japanese guy named Miles is there to help them get out from the place before the shit hits the fan. Once out, everything seems to be under control, and the friends head of to a sleazy porno theatre called Venus Theatre to relax and to forget about the unfortunate mishappening. They buy tickets and enter the place, unknown that the Triad boss and his men have followed them. The bloodbath is about to begin...
Obviously, Live Feed seemed to be somewhat similar to Hostel, dealing with a group of trapped people being exposed to severe torture. But other than that, the movies are a bit different from one another, and I wouldn't put too much weight on comparing them. I mean, Live Feed might not be a very original movie, but the main reason for watching this is of course not for originality, but for the gore, blood and carnage. Now gore is something that this movie offers a helluva lot of, and even if it has its faults when talking about the acting, the score, the script itself, whatever, at least it delivers full-on gore and carnage, which will probably make every gorehound out there jump with joy. Well, at least those parts of the movie won't leave the gore craving sickos unsatisfied.
I found it to be quite hard to put a rating on Live Feed, and the reason for that is because when looking at it from one point of view, it has some extremely bad things in it, but looking at it from another point of view, it also has a lot to offer. Let's break it down, shall we? On the negative side of things, there's too much crap in the way before we get to the good stuff, exacly like it was with Hostel. Now, this is not a huge thing really, and once the nastiness kicks in, the movie kinda redeems itself so to speak. Thing with Hostel was that it promised a lot, and when you finally got to see it, your expectations were pretty much through the roof, which is never a good thing. With Live Feed, I wasn't really expecting anything, although I can admit that I was interested to see what they had done with it gore-wise, but I never really thought it would be a very good flick to begin with. And I think that made all the difference; that is no expectations, and therefore I could take the movie for what it really was, nothing more, nothing less.
 
The actors were decent at best, with some of them being really lousy. The prize for worst actor in the movie goes to the Triad boss who shows what crappy acting is all about. I could definitely go on complaining about the acting but I don't really see any reason to, you'll notice when you see it. Since I want to get the complaints out of the way, it's probably best to dive right into the score which was truly the most annoying thing this movie had to offer. All music were basically just irritating, and while I can see the reason for why they played traditional Chinese music early on when the group visited a night market, the fact still remains, it sucked. Sometimes the music was so bad and irritating that I found myself having a hard time to focus on what was going on in the movie, now that's a real downer. Other than that, the fact that they were really not in China, but in China Town somewhere made it come out looking a bit stupid as well. Also, the Chinese guys couldn't seem to decide whether or not they should speak English or Chinese to each other which also made it look a bit dumb. These are little things though, and if you try (hard) not to think about it, you'll be ok.
The very best thing that Live Feed had to offer was the giant butcher who was wearing a freaky leather mask. When this guy first made his apperance, my jaw almost dropped to the floor. I mean, talk about being intimidating. This guy was H-U-G-E, and by wearing this bizarre mask, it sure made him look even more freaky, and also for the fact that you knew that he was gonna brutalize the group of unlikable teens kinda made you forgive the movie for its previous faults. This giant was definitely the highlight of the movie. Gore-wise you get to see a lot of nasty things, dismemberment, torture and most things that you can think of. There's for instance one scene where they force a snake down a girls throat using a plastic tube, pretty gross. So if for nothing else, at least you'll always have that.
There's basically just one reason why you'd wanna watch Live Feed, and that is of course for the explicit gore. It has its fair share of problems, and I really wonder why you got to see a naked chick dancing on stage early on in the movie for what felt like forever. This was shown with full frontal nudity, but didn't really make any sense or didn't have anything to do with anything, just totally pointless. I guess I could see a bunch of clueless teens enjoy this sort of thing, but it just felt extremely unnecessary and above all, way too drawn out. This thing kinda put me off right from the start but about 40 minutes into the movie, it suddenly got a helluva lot better, and actually managed to stay that way for the rest of the movie. Why it gets a "higher" rating is simply because of the huge butcher which looked really nasty and was great. Other than that, the gory stuff sure was entertaining enough. This review of Live Feed was for the unrated version, and since I haven't seen the rated version, I can't really say how different things would look. But if you're only after the gore and torture, I see no reason why you'd wanna watch the rated version.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2006
DIRECTOR: Ryan Nicholson
WRITING CREDITS: Ryan Nicholson
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Mike Bennett, Taayla Markell, Kevan Ohtsji
COUNTRY: Canada
RUNTIME: 82 min
RATING: 6/10
Live Feed Website/IMDB Click here
Live Feed Trailer Click here
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