Botched is such a maddening movie.

As you watch it, you get glimmers of hope that it’ll be a decent piece of entertainment, worth your rental and more importantly worth your time. You press play with subdued hopes, wait, wait some more, laugh, see something gory, and maybe you settle in expecting this purported horror-comedy to deliver the goods…or at least, not suck.

You know kids, it MIGHT have been better if Botched was just a flat out terrible movie, because then you wouldn’t spend 90 minutes having your meager hopes time and time again quashed before the credits roll.

Oh well… Let’s get this over with…

Ritchie (Stephen Dorff) is a thief. He’s not a bad thief; he just seems to be unlucky. When an opening scene robbery is…screwed up (I’m trying not to say botched), he is forced to take ONE LAST JOB or else…

…I’m sure you can figure out what else…

His job is to steal a valuable gold cross in Russia. And of course things go wrong when his partner Peter (Jamie Foreman) kills a girl during the robbery. They flee and are forced to take an elevator down as they are on the top floor. More people enter the elevator, much to the chagrin of our robber/killer protagonists. You think that’s bad?

The elevator stops…on the 13th floor. Oooooh….

No communication, no way of getting out. No problem, right? Not so fast kids…

Ritchie and Peter take their hostages off the elevator and onto the mysterious unlabeled 13th floor.

And that’s when the shit goes down. What follows includes decapitation, near castration, and bountiful amounts of blood and gore. Too bad what doesn’t follow is anything truly scary, and WAY too many dead spots between the laughs. By the end of the 90 minutes, you could say that director Kit Ryan…fucked up (still not saying botched) in making a coherent and satisfying (even with lowered expectations) movie.

What works about Botched-

1) Stephen Dorff- He does solid work in another mediocre film. You like him, and he’s totally believable as a more than capable thief. But hey, at least this isn’t as bad as Alone in the Dark

2) Opening scene with its really bad traffic. Or maybe someone just doesn’t know the rules of the road.

3) That Huge Rat- it drags bodies, it sprays when it pees. It’s sadly one of the funnier characters in the movie.

4) Dmitri’s unlucky seat- Good thing it wasn’t a couple more inches forward. OUCH!!!

5) Boris Bogdanovich the Alpha Male security guard- he’s the only character the consistently delivers laughs (“It’s not like you journalists say, all bully, cannibalism and homosexual rape”)

6) You think you’re going home, you open the elevator door, and these shears attack you and decapitate you. THAT is a bad day…

7) The tapestry of human skin. Tasty.

8) The spiky floor- complete with…disco music.

9) A fridge full of flesh

10) That’s one way to deal with a severed hand, but I bet it smells…

11) A tribute to Reservoir Dogs

12) Don’t you hate it when you’re fucking one of your co-workers on a copy machine and then the ceiling caves in and about a dozen corpses in various states of decay fall on top of you? It might ruin the amorous mood

13) Ivan the Terrible fucking a pair feet- You have to see it to know what I mean.

14) Pulp Fiction’s Bronagh Gallagher as the worst older sister/religious nut you’d ever want

15) The unlucky timing of a door-axe

What doesn’t work-

1) Most of what works in the movie are just moments. And you spend much more time than you should waiting for them. What’s frustrating is that when you begin to give up, something funny happens which gives you hope. And then your hopes are dashed waiting for something else decent to happen. You get my drift

2) Like I said earlier, not scary in the least

3) A scene involving three men running down a hall isn’t funny in the least

What makes Botched more disappointing than anything else are the moments of chewy goodness that lets you in on the movie it could have been. I’ve seen worse, as we all have, but I can’t say that I’ve been more exasperated. When the movie ends you think to yourself ‘That could have been sooooo much better’ but it ends up another decent movie watching experience…botched (I’m sorry).