Caged (2010)

Overrated

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

IMDb summary:"A group of medical aid workers in Kosovo is kidnapped by a non Slavic gang of organ traffickers". Only non-Slavic group who lives in Kosovo are Albanians,so what are you wrote in summary makes no sense at all to what happened in the movie. Whoever signed this piece of satanic propaganda did a awful job anyway.First read the Trivia. For a second forget about all that,in this movie Serbs are abducting French people and other Serbs to sell their organs to Albanians.WTF! Little girl in captivity is Ana,that is Serbian name,and cant be Albanian by any case.One of bad guys with big tattoo on his back "God Save Serbs" speaks Croatian,and when he start to run towards cornfield he magically turns into Russian,speaking their language.Is this done on purpose? Second guy,one who gets a rock in the head in same cornfield is Croat,earlier in conversation with another evil "serb" he mentioned that he cheers for soccer club "Dinamo".That is Croatian soccer club,and there is no Serb on this planet who is Dinamo fan. So,moron who tried to alter the truth and make a mockery of victims from the "Yellow House" is so stupid,that he was unable to do a very simple task.

What could be worse than being cut open and having your internal organs removed while you're still alive? Well, in Caged, which I saw with English subtitles, it takes it to an extreme.When a French medical team ends up abducted and locked up, one of them, Samir, is dragged away, and it turns out that the team has been abducted for illegal organ harvesting.This type of plot has been used countless times, but in most movies organ harvesting is never so graphic. Caged shows it in great detail, making it a truly disturbing and scary movie to view, which was their intention, and they pulled it off extremely well. The acting wasn't very good and the soundtrack was pretty boring, but if you want to see a scary movie, look no further than this.

I am not going to go deep into the movie, but it was "OK". Recently in horror or thriller movies, housewives know how to use knives or to hit someone to dead, ordinary people defeat trained soldiers and on and on and I hate the lack of credibility. This movie was different. First: the acting was quite decent and second: Everything was justified, for once. So at least I didn't see fake heroes or people that seems immortal. Carole, the main character, has a very well justified phobia for dogs, that will make things complicated for her later on in the movie. It is justified how much she loves and cares about children, so when she tries to rescue Ana, the little girl, she is not a super hero, but that's what she does. She is a doctor, so she knows how to use surgery knives in a very precise way, and it is not pure good luck that she does what she does later on in the movie with a surgery knife. Besides that, the movie doesn't give anything new. Organ traffickers, innocent people being killed, and of course, only one character (the main one, and the weakest-Carole-) and a little girl survive. Why can't they ever work together to kill the bad guys and so all of the good ones (or most of them) survive? It is a good movie if you just wanna jump on your chair a couple of times, and get a little bit uncomfortable (due to the organs) and scared, but yet, not much. For a Sunday night when there is nothing to do, it is perfect.

So Caged might not fit up there with the other French greats quite so much due to its unoriginal set-up which we've all seen before. However this has a twist because it's French! The French tend to do everything right what the Americans do wrong. Caged undeniably has the similar set-up and themes to mediocre films like Turistas or Hostel (although Hostel is better than Turistas) but it manages to keep things incredibly tense and have characters that you can care for so that you actually care about the film itself.Right from the opening you know that Caged is going to be a superior horror as it features a childhood flashback of the main character. American slasher-type horror films probably wouldn't bother doing this, but it really does help us to get more in-depth into the character so we can care about her more. Furthermore it helps that the victims aren't annoying/stupid teenagers or twenty-somethings. They're mature adults who you can respect and it's a feature that a lot of slasher films forget to do. I liked all of the main victims and I was sad to see them go because it was clear that they had a strong bond with each other.I also liked how Caged didn't take an awful long time to get into the action. We have just the right time to build up the characters and then we can just sit on the edge of our seat for the rest of it as we see them become crushed! I don't mean that in a vindictive way (nasty, vindictive and rude, rude, rude!) just in the slasher formula way. In case you don't know the characters get kidnapped by foreigners and are taken to a Martyrs-like prison (though less high-tech) where they await there turn to the operating table. There's a great claustrophobic atmosphere as we're not allowed to see the light of day, just like they aren't. There's a sense of entrapment and you can't help but root for them to break free.You might think that watching a film where people are caged for the majority would be boring but it's not. The directing and acting are lively enough to keep you focused and become involved with the characters. The film's second-half (I don't want to spoil anything) is also a complete thrill ride! It's highly suspenseful and incredibly tense. I was shouting at my TV and found myself becoming very involved in the narrative, even if it does seem familiar! There's also a fair amount of gore to enhance the entertainment value, and of course some nasty scenes are put in place which heightens our knowledge of how ballsy French films are.I also really liked the cinematography in Caged too. There were some great long shots of the corridor of cages and the film also had a great look to it which made it feel dirty and raw, which is what you want in a horror film. I also really liked the suspenseful directing which keeps you on your toes the whole way through (especially the second half). All in all, Caged is an unfairly over-looked horror film which oozes style and tension. It's far better than American offerings that generate more profit than this does (unfairly I might add!) Yes Caged might not be the most original horror film, but it's certainly one of the best of its kind and I can't urge you enough to go and seek out this solid tiny gem!