The movie opens with its best moment, a roving tracking shot that moves throughout a party, observing the alcohol-infused conversations that crop up in such places. It’s a masterpiece of quiet observation, and anyone who has ever spent time with drunk people, especially if they were drunk themselves at the time, would surely recognise the behavior of all the characters: loudly declaiming blatant falsehoods as pearls of wisdom, debating questions about pop culture, looking fervently for somebody to flirt with. Indeed, the camera essentially adopts the point of view of a tipsy individual at just such a party, lurching from one point to another, searching for some group to butt into, and drifting away whenever it becomes boring. The party sequence ends, at least for the moment, when one poor bastard stumbles into the wrong room, and is jumped by a man who garrotes him to death.
Thereafter, we are shown what led up to the party, although it’s not immediately obvious that’s what’s going on. In essence: Ken (Craig Beffa) and Ellen (Dona Ellis) have just moved into the suburbs, and they’re throwing a housewarming party to celebrate. A few hours beforehand, two men dressed as Mormon missionaries come to the door, and Ellen lets them in – a bad move, seeing as the one with a deep, raspy voice (Joe Noelker) turns out to have some reason to be angry with the couple, and the wide-eyed one (director Warren himself) is apparently just nuts.
Cue the low-budget torture pornography, as the two men – who aren’t actually Mormons, it would seem by this point – levy various physical and emotional punishments on the couple. None of this turns out to be nearly as horrendous as in most such films, first because the production’s limitations don’t allow for very many elaborate gore effects (and the one exception to this rule proves why it was a good idea), second because we’re never even once asked to identify with the torturers – really just the one torturer, played by Warren, for even his accomplice clearly finds him alarmingly unhinged. He’s just flat-out crazy, without any indication we’re meant to think of him as aught but an unknowable psychopath.
In fact, that character is one of the two things that really elevates The Path of Torment above so many of the films just like it. A lot of the movie is strictly amateur-hour: the production design is laughably thin; the sound, though much clearer than in a lot of indies, sounds a bit tinny and it kind of “floats” on the film – my guess is that a lot of it was awkwardly post-looped; and several of the performers are as clumsy and stiff as you’d ever expect in a film like this. This is particularly damaging in the case of Ellis, on-screen as much as anyone else in the cast: though she’s quite natural in the first twenty minutes or so, once the psychos break in she becomes intolerably flat, never reacting to the depravities she’s witnessing and suffering with anything but peevish annoyance.
Still, those two things: for one, the shots, allowing for the fact that the movie was made on an obviously dinky camera, and they’re cut together quite well (Alejandro Cruz shot the film; the editor was – surprise! – Gary C. Warren). The second thing is the film’s approach to the loonier killer, the one played by the director, the one with an overwhelming obsession with television. Criminals riffing on pop-culture is de rigeur nowadays, of course, but Warren’s character is something else entirely; at every moment possible and several where it really isn’t, he’s going on some rant or another about his programs. It’s evident that he doesn’t even really understand “life that isn’t television” anymore, and most of the other characters notice it too – itself a strong break from the bulk of similar movies, where the rest of the cast would just join in on the riffing. This is so over-the-top and inexplicable that it finally becomes apparent that we’re actually watching something of a satire, executed through sheer ridiculousness. It’s this, at the last, that makes The Path of Torment a kind of special microbudget thriller; it’s awareness of how ludicrous microbudget thrillers are, almost by their very nature.