Last Night's Captivity Party: Torturous

The party last night In Hollywood to celebrate the release of the new torture-porn horror flick Captivity had been billed by the New York Times as possibly setting a new standard for politically incorrect. So it's fair to say that we at Portfolio West were hoping for just a little bit of shock and/or awe. Or at least the sacrifice of one small animal. Not so much.

While there had been the promise of a night of cage fighting and torture chambers, inside Sunset Blvd. nightclub Privilege one found instead hordes of sweaty 20-something-year-old men, some writhing semi-nude chicks with black tape on their nipples, and members of a "piercing tribe" who rapturously pierced one another's backs with long needles attached to peacock feathers. It felt a little as if a young Clive Barker were throwing a basement kegger while his parents were away. Producer of the film and controversy mastermind Courtney Solomon, who has produced several Dungeons & Dragons films, seemed to carry over an adolescent and fantastical aesthetic from his previous work. Whither the magicians we asked?

With the sort of tame, late 90s feel, it was hard to understand why the party set-up had been handled by super crisis-management firm Sitrick & Co., or why three female reporters--from Portfolio, the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker--had been told over the weekend they were uninvited to the party. After kicking up dust, they (we) were let back in. When asked about the initially rescinded invitation last night, Solomon said, "there had been a lot of sketchy people on the list " and that we had been flagged. Hmmm. Portfolio? WSJ? New Yorker? Sketchy publications indeed.

Much about Captivity, with a plot that centers on the torture of a hot model, has seemed a little like we've seen a lot of it before. The film hits theaters this Friday the 13th, and comes on the heels of the box office washout of Eli Roth's Hostel II. Toward the end of the night, Solomon, who stood watching as a pale and bare chested man was suspended from a rack by pins in his flesh, ruminated on what might be the sunset of the torture-porn genre. "It's at the end of a movie cycle," he said. "This is like a party for the end."

--Claire Hoffman

[Photo credit: Luke Ford]