Audience Member
Invitation Only basically succeeds in all its goals and ambitions..... the goal is to make a good and sustainable slasher flick, the ambition is to shock and maintain the audience attention. The fact that the film is actually brutal enough to satisfy me, then it must be a good thing after all...... still, without ignoring the numerous plot holes, Invitation Only works well as a whole and most certainly have plenty of moments in shock, brute, fun and quite simply, mindless entertainment..... with all being said, Invitation Only is really designated for particular genre fans only and if you look at the movie from that perspective, the film have plenty to slash about...
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/10/23
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Audience Member
This is basically an Asian version of 'Hostel', but just nowhere near as good. The story is not as clear or as well executed, and it basically comes across as a bit of a random gore fest with no real purpose. It starts off with a lad who gets given an invite to an exclusive bash with a host of wealthy party-goers. However, he soon begins to realise that his invite wasn't by chance, as he and four other newbies are all purposely sent there for what is to be their grisly execution. It's basically a secret organisation that kills people who they believe are not worthy of their place in life, but I'm not 100% sure! I struggled to follow the message behind this one, which wasn't helped by the fact that the subtitles shot on and off the screen like lightning and at one stage they were even translating the English speech, which didn't even match what the person was saying (maybe that has something to do with the fact I've probably bought a knock off DVD though). It had its fair share of jumps, but there was nothing original about it, and it became somewhat over the top gore wise in the sense that people who have had their face torn up and throat slit were still coming back to life and losing another 50 pints of blood before eventually passing away. Unfortunately these sort of films that are produced with striking similarities to other franchise successes are always going to be compared against them, and you could tell from the start that this was never going to be able to compete with the Hostel series! Nice try, but no cigar.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
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Audience Member
Some excellent gore moments! In the same vein as hostel, but better!
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/03/23
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Audience Member
so sadistic. I wanna puke
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
02/12/23
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Audience Member
<strong>Invitation Only</strong> (Kevin Ko, 2009)
The beginning of the last decade saw film cultures we never thought we'd see doing it releasing silly zombedies, from Greece's <em>To Kako</em> to Ireland's <em>Dead Meat</em>. At the end of the last decade, the trend had shifted to torture porn. (Unless you were already doing torture porn. Norway, for example, slapped <em>Dead Snow</em> on us seven years after they released their first torture porn film... and, one should note, they beat the US by three years in <em>that</em> particular race.) 2009 saw two countries I never thought would release torture porn films release their first torture porn films. Thailand gave us Tiwa Moeithaisong's <em>The Meat Grinder</em> (viz. 16Mar2011 review), and Taiwan offered up Kevin Ko's <em>Invitation Only</em>. My first gut reaction, writing on a list where we're encouraged to let loose with our first impressions, was "Moeithaisong gave us a better film-it was more like <em>Mother</em> than it was <em>Hostel</em>-but Ko knows a lot more about what makes this kind of movie tick." In the week since I watched it, I have yet to come up with anything that refutes that as a solid base for a longer review.
Ko, a first-time director working from a script by first-time writers Sung In and Carolyn Lin, gives us the story of a young man, Wade Chen (<em>Yang Yang</em>'s Bryant Chang), a ne'er-do-well who makes his living as a chauffeur. After he catches his boss in a compromising position, said boss gives him an invitation to an exclusive party the boss can't go to for reasons he's evasive about, presumably to buy his silence. The back of the invitation invites Wade to write down his fondest wish; he does so, then heads for the do. When he gets there, he finds out he's one of five new "members" to this exclusive club. Pretty much by default, the five come together and start talking. There's Kao, an award-winning concert pianist (Yin-Hsuan Kao in his first screen role); a power-hungry politician, Legislator Lin (fellow newcomer Joseph Ma); Holly (Vivi Ho, another, yes, you guessed it, screen debut); and Hitomi (Julianne Chu, another newcomer), a maid/caregiver. Wade is kind of hitting it off with Hitomi before Dana (Japanese porn star Maria Ozawa, who recently broke into mainstream success with a number of appearances in Kekko Kamen franchise flicks), an up-and-coming fashion model Wade is obsessed with, cuts in, and we think maybe we know what exactly it was Wade wrote on that card... except it's <em>after</em> that bit that a couple of the party's bouncers hunt Wade and Dana up, the rest of the group in tow, and say it's time for them to receive their gifts. Wade's is the first of the batch, and when the bouncers pull the warehouse door aside... well, that would be telling. But I'm not a [x] guy, and even my mouth was watering. Wade's totally stoked, and grabs Hitomi (who seems none the worse for Wade ditching her for an hour to go live out his fashion-model fantasy), and they head for... it. (Trust me, it's worth the surprise.) It's so sexy you almost don't notice one of the bouncers turning to Richard and saying "your piano is ready. Come with me...". Which turns out to be very important, since that's where the film turns into the gorefest it so badly wants to be. This isn't a complete spoiler; before the warehouse scene, we see Dana get hers after Wade has left the room. In any case, the remaining four soon stumble upon Richard's body, and after Lin goes nuts, they find themselves scattered to the wind, with each of them picking up a little more information about what's going on. And, of course, trying to keep their heads on their shoulders.
You know what really sucks about torture porn films, in general? While most of them are pretty darned good at the setup (and those that aren't, e.g. <em>Train</em>, you're better off just forgetting exist), the follow-through is rarely as worthwhile. I always go back to the Big Reveal in <em>Saw</em>, and the envelope-pushing shocks in <em>Men Behind the Sun</em>. Few modern torture porn directors are willing to spend as much time on story as Wan and Whannell did in the former, or abandon story almost altogether like Mous did in the latter. We inevitably end up with the worst features of both styles, or we end up (as we did with Moeithaisong's flick) with something that isn't torture porn at all. Ko takes us down the exact same paths so many other directors have before, most notably John Stockwell (<em>Turistas</em>), though Ko and his screenwriting team are more interested in class war than xenophobia. But there are so many threads here that, if Ko had used them, could have turned this into the first really good torture porn film since Stockwell's five years ago. I mean, the screenwriters actually came up with a really clever hook vis-a-vis <em>why</em> these particular folks show up at this party. It's multi-layered, it shows a great deal of thought, and then... it's abandoned. Which is all the more frustrating given the movie's final scene, which is arguably its best... or would have been had Ko returned to that clever, well-thought-out hook and <em>brought it back into play</em>, which is obviously where that scene was going. But no, it just kind of ends. (Which, I guess, is better than going on ten minutes too long, like <em>The Last Exorcism</em> did.)
For being what it is, a torture porn/action thriller that never really has any intentions of being anything else, <em>Invitation Only</em> is pretty good at what it does, and is certainly better than anything America, Europe, or Japan have turned out in the genre in the past half-decade. But I still can't give it anything higher than an average rating, because it could have been more and it isn't. Why bother cluing the audience in that you have those pretensions and then never acting on them? It's baffling. ** 1/2
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
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Audience Member
Another hostel type movie that it's not scary nor exciting.
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
02/27/23
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