The Eleventh Aggression starts out with a genuinely shocking moment, as crazed Vietnam Vet Jeffrey Walters (Steve Furedy) strings his cheating stripper girlfriend upside down, tears open her jeans and funnels drain cleaner into her – a brutal and nasty opening scene, and one that isn’t shot in an excessively explicit manner, instead leaving the more explicit nastiness to our imagination. It suggests that this could be an intense, disturbing and serious study of psychosis. But things start to go somewhat awry after that.

Unfortunately, this film seems uncertain as to what it wants to be – while presented as a hardcore horror movie, much of the 96 minute running time is, in fact, taken up with the investigations of two mismatched cops – one a by-the-book guy (Lanny Rethaber) who’s marriage is falling apart, the other a hard ass rebel (Patrick Adam, who looks like a poor man’s Colin Farrell). So, pretty clichéd. Every so often, director Charles Peterson remembers what the film is supposedly about, and we get to see Walters taking violent revenge against people who have wronged him – the guy who steals his booze at knifepoint, the horny couple who cut him off on the highway – in scenes of torture that strangely lack any real kick. Eventually, things all come together with the cops tracking down the crazed killer, leading to a final twist that isn’t particularly impressive.

I can’t fault the ambition of this film, and it has its impressive moments. But the two cops are pretty uninteresting characters, played by struggling actors, and their screen presence is excessive. Furedy is more effective as the killer, but is given little to do apart from rage against the injustices he sees in life and engage in lacklustre tortures.

The gore scenes are fairly effective, and there’s some agreeable nudity, but this is a film that probably needed a touch more bad taste to really work; instead, Peterson seems to be trying to make a respectable film, but doesn’t have the resources or the talent to work with in order to make that work. The end result is a film that is not uninteresting, but far too long and slow moving. Ultimately a failure then, but not an entirely worthless one.

DAVID FLINT

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