Mustang Sally’s Horror House (2006, New Line American World Cinema, dir. wr. Iren Koster, 88 min, R). “It’ll never get any better than this.”  That’s a great line from Mustang Sally, the owner of a whore house that is not the best in California. Once again, we have the setup of people going to a “resort” and finding horror that they didn’t bargain for. This time, the marks are six college boys looking for some nooky at a mountain house of ill repute. The place is Mustang Sally’s, run by guess who (a rather ascetic looking Elizabeth Daily). The alpha male of the group is Josh Henderson (Mark Parrish, a Massachusetts actor trying to follow in the steps of Damon, Affleck and Wahlberg  The movie is told in retrospect from Josh’s point of view; as the film opens, he sits in a hospital bed, in recollection. Soon the story six weeks ago starts. As it starts, Josh wears a t-shirt that reads “Manifesto” with a skull below. I’m not sure what that means, but I think it’s steganographic.  Despite the shirt, he comes across as much more civil than the other five boys (incl. Erik Fellows, Garrison Koch, Sonny Marler, Al Santos), who are more like Army buddies expecting some unit cohesion, even as they have impressive parents and life plans.  They arrive at the hideaway, that could come from a Richard Condon novel, and Sally lays down the rules. The boys split up for their adventures, and the hookers start taking their revenge. We in turn learn of the connection of the boys to some bad karma in the past. Josh, a gentler soul, rises above it and connects with his partner and gets to tell his story to the police and the shrinks six weeks later.

Mark Parrish reportedly broke his leg with a motorcycle accident near the set, and appears in a cast in the last hospital scene. That works out. A similar incident happened with Brad Pitt in filming Se7en. Koster wrote a great disco theme song for the movie, that might start appearing on dance floors.

The film was originally called just “Mustang Sally.”

FearDotCom (2002, Warner Bros./Sony TriStar, dir. William Malone, story by Moshe Diamant, hard R). New York City detectives follow a trail of killings where every victim had visited a certain website. To solve the mystery they have to go into the website, as if it were a “second life.” People go to the site to watch vivisection or autopsies of victims still alive, and the webmaster knows who the visitors are, and they will get their just desserts for their voyourism. The film uses the “film noir” tricks – subdued colors, constant rain, a city that seems imaginary (as in Se7en). Stephen Dorff, Natascha McElhone, Stephen Rea, Udo Kier. It’s interesting that this story was written and movie made some time before the rise of social networking sites. The upcoming (2008) Screen Gems film “Untraceable” has a related premise.  So does the Dreamworks “Ring” franchise.

Untraceable (2008, Screen Gems / Lakeshore, dir. Gregory Hoblit, 100 min, R). An unstable young man (played by Joseph Cross), angered when the local television station exploits his father’s suicide, tracks down an kidnaps workers associated with the incident and rigs them to killing machines, viewed on the Internet from a webcam, with sensors do accelerate the death of the victim according to the page requests from visitors. Yes, it’s unprecedented. Diane Lane is the tough FBI agent in the Portland, OR field office who leads the effort to track him down. The executions are really graphic, involving visual dermal mutilations (such as a sulfuric acid vat). So, some people have characterized this film as “torture porn” like the “Hostel” or “Saw” movies. But it is really a film that explores the hazards of the Internet and the way consumer voyeurism can contribute to harm and crime.