The Horsemen (2008)

Review by Adam C. Thomas



A very interesting sub-genre of horror is the revenge movie. It is sometimes classified as horror, but also commonly classified as action. The classification depends on the content of the film, obviously. The Horseman has enough gore and violence to be classified as a horror, film in my opinion.

The movie opens on a man who finds out his daughter is dead. He knows she died of a drug overdose, and now he has made it his job to hunt down and punish those responsible. Along the way, the story gets more and more twisted. She was forced to be in a porno with a group of other men, she was fed drugs to keep her compliant, and with every new bit of information Christian finds out only fuels his drive to find and kill these people that much further. Along the way he picks up a young hitchhiker named Alice, who serves to keep reminding him of his humanity.

The violence in this movie would be over the top, if it didn’t just feel right. Every person he comes in cotnact with related to his daughter’s death meets a grisly, creative, untimely end. This movie has no reservations with the special effects, either. The director frequently shows bones being broken with no cut of the camera, and as well there are a lot of groin-related torture methods in this movie. One particular scene that was by far the most unsettling involves Christian tying one of the men to a chair, naked, running fish hooks through his penis, and then threading fishing line through said hooks. This allows him to coax information out of the victim with only the slightest of tugs.

Overall, this movie is definitely one of, if not THE best revenge movie i’ve ever seen. If you want a great movie about retribution and humanity, or just a great gory torture flick, check this one out. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. 9/10.