I never thought art could be terrorism – then I saw “Funny Games”. I’m not lying when I say that I could have enjoyed a pack of chimpanzees ritually beating my penis with a rock more than this movie. About an hour in I seriously considered climbing up to the projection booth, knocking the projectionist unconscious, and burning the film stock so as to save future viewers from having to be subjected to such a film. I’m not lying when I say this might be the worst film I’ve ever seen in theaters (previously held by "Very Bad Things") and perhaps even worse than anything on MST3K episodes, only because Mike and the Bots made those films watchable.

The “plot”, and I use that term as loosely as written English allows me to do, consists of a bourgeois white family arriving at their summer home on a lake in a nondescript part of America. George (Tim Roth), Ann (Naomi Watts), and George, Jr (Devon Gearhart). and their boring, WASPish lives are interrupted by two sadistic preppies, “Paul” (Michael Pitt) and “Peter” (Brady Corbet), who come over for a carton of eggs but stay to torture and kill all the family members. Although that’s a “spoiler” it’s really not – because you never empathize with any one of the characters nor is there a redeeming philosophical point in the plot. By 30 minutes in I was begging for the deaths of all the characters so the credits could roll and I could leave. That’s about all you need to know.

The director, Michael Haneke, has said he wanted to create a psychological “torture porn” movie in order to show the audience how they are complicit by watching till the end. It’s movies like this that make me wish we could send people like Haneke to Gitmo. What was he thinking? This movie is painful to watch and brings us two hours closer to death; on the whole even films like "Norbit" are more interesting to watch if only because they make us want to commit suicide a bit less.

Note to Mr. Haneke: if you’re going to try to make a statement about sadistic films, make us care about the characters, make us care about the plot, make us care about something. Go watch a movie like “A Clockwork Orange” for more on that, or better yet, let’s tie directors like him down to chairs and pry their eyes open like in “Clockwork Orange” and show them films that matter. Sadly, although it’s not hard to make quality films, neither is it hard to make films that detract from our intelligence and culture, and that’s exactly what Haneke has done.

--Ickyru