The Torture Scene by Matt Layden - Short - Two men in one room. One is tied up, the other sits in front of him with a black bag. One of these men will be tortured and one will die. But who? And why? 8 pages. - html, format 8)

A lot of these torture scripts are popping up now. And to be honest i think it will be overdone very soon. But i'll put that aside and read your script.

Here is what i think:

At first everything will think "oh great a Saw ripoff" but i think you did an excellent job with making this NOT seem like Saw. Good job on that.

Your format is excellent so i won't bitch on that.

The dialouge could be better. But it gets the point across. I would say it's average but if were to be filmed i'm sure people would get a few unintentional laughs out of it.

Why is DAVE always capital? And SAM as well. You only need to have it capital when we first meet the character.

Okay overall it was JUST OKAY. It could of been a lot better but i saw this to be a lot worse.SO you suprised me because i thought it would be bad. But it was only a little better then bad. Good attempt at a torture story though.

2/5

My bad on the names.

I wrote it in ten minutes just to let everyone know my style.

Thanks for the words, will take them into consideration for next script.

Well, I liked the premise.  It does have a SAW feel to it.  Don't know if that was your inspiration.  You have a few typos here and there but they're not hard to notice si I won't bother you with it.

The problem I had with this is time.  When you put a timer in a script, everything shuld revolve around it.  The characters should react to it accordingly.  I think that the opposite happens here.  You put in the timer when it really didn't matter to the victim anyway so no suspense was created.  You see?

If you could put it in earlier and make the victim actually believe he has five minutes to live, well, that would make it a lot more anxious of an environment.  And the fact that the man in black is talking and talking and wasting time, then your character shoudl get angered at this too.

I liked the fact that you don't really know who killed who.  That's a proper ending.

Other than that, I liked it.  Nice short.

I mostly agreed with what Andrew romance and Leanordjenkis wrote. Except I think it more closely resembles Hostel than Saw. And the part with the five minutes between tortures is out of the middle short film "Cut" out of the movie "Three Extremes", a horror movie from Japan...I think. But I really dig your style, very similar to my own in fact, your format is really good which is a relief. Dave and Sam shouldn't be in caps all the time however, and the main problem I have with it I guess would be the time in which you did it. I really liked your dialogue, and I thought it was really great considering you did it in five minutes, but think it could be A LOT better if you put more time into it, and develop it into say a 20-30 page short. It could have been better if we knew more about what Dave did  rather than just imply what he's been doing, more unique torturing every five minutes would have been better, just the drill is old hat. Plus, there was no relevance to the clock, especially when he said tat he would torture him but not necessarily kill him. It seems he would have had more"fun" with Dave before killing him. I thought it ended too abruptly, and Dave seemed to take it in stride too much at the end. I also didn't like the ambiguous ending, it just happened to fast. Maybe if you would have had Dave doing something with his hands or something like that during their talking to make it seem like he could get loose, but it just didn't fit with everything. Otherwise, not bad for 10 minutes. I enjoyed it very much.

Thanks for the words everyone who read. Now, before anyone says anything about the next short, I did put all their names in capitals again. I wrote it before this one was up, it's called The Novel.

I'm thinking of writing a longer version of The Torture Scene and sharpening all the edges. Obviously I'll put more time on it then just ten minutes.

Hey Matt

Your title hooked me enought to read your script. My first impression was a take off of the "SAW" theme.

In the first two paragraphs you introduce Dave and a Man. It might be better if you give the man a name. Also, a bit of an introduction to the man would help out. Remember characters are not flat but layered should  be presented in three d.

I did like your dialog. Someone else said they didn't so you can see that feedback is always in the eyes of the beholder.

Your ending was weak. It just suddenly stopped. And if this were a torture scene you didn't really torture Dave enough. One cut over his eye is not enough. Tear him up. Get creative with his torture.

Spencer

Matthew,  you have titled this "The Torture Scene", but there's no torture in it.

I'm not saying that I'm into guts and gore, but if  someone cut me above my eye and I got a trickle of blood in my eye, I'd get cranky.

If you think it's reasonable for Dave to scream over this, all I can say is "there's a reason why God does not let guys have babies".

Don't take me wrong, it's not that your writing is that bad, just needs to be upped about 62X in order to fit the title.

I liked it. And I liked the ending also. Though agreeing with other people, not much torture. But I did like most of it. Just like everyone else, the first time I read the summary, I thought it was going to be exactly like Saw, but then it wasn't.

Hehe, good job.

Sean

Yeah, I saw a bit of Saw early on.
A bit of Hostel.
This scene also reminds me of the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs.
Very talky, but I like your command.
Conversational, but not bland.
I like Sam's dialogue better than Dave's.
Some of Dave's talk early on doesn't always ring true.
But then again, I didn't know his character at that point.
Once it's clear Dave is a man of influence, I think I buy into his words.

Start that timer from the get-go.
Have Sam refer to it often.  It's the old ticking bomb routine, so use it to your advantage.
Why is the drill scene at the end done offscreen?
This is a torture story.
Or are we the one's getting tortured in anticipation?
I think Sam's got to make the head cut early.
Then as each minute passes, he does something else.
Each torture different.   A cut here, a pull there, a burn after that, you get the idea.
You've got 5 minutes to mix talk with torture.
Get to it.

This seems like a prelude to something bigger.
Maybe not. It kind of works on its own.
Great work on format and the technical things.
Really impressed with your style.
Will read more of your stuff as it comes.

I see how putting the timer in at the beginning would be more intense for the reader. Thanks for the comments and critique.

I didn't much care for this one. The title is misleading as there isn't any torture at all. Most of it was just dialogue, which isn't neccesarily bad but I didn't think the characters were very good at all. It would help to explain what exactly Dave does for a living. It's not enough just to say he cheats people out of money for a living. I don't think his reasoning for what he does was very realistic either. If he's trying to keep himself from getting tortured, I don't think it'd help to say he takes pride in ripping off jerks. Even if they are rich folks who've never worked a day in their life, he's still admitting to ripping people off which is the very reason why he's being tortured. Also, Sam says he wants to know something from Dave but never says what it is and he says he's good at his job yet he ends up killing Dave without getting any information from him. I assume the end was supposed to be an ambiguous one as well but it's quite obvious that Sam killed Dave. Maybe if Dave broke out of his chair, the ending would have a better effect. Not much else to say. Good effort but I think it needs a lot of work.

I've done some re-writes on "The Torture Scene" and was wondering how to update the link? Should I just re-submit the script?

Yes

I guess I liked it. I agree that you could of used more torture. And I didn't like how the names were in capitals. But i did like the ending, liked how we didn't know who it was for sure.

I revised the torture scene and re-submitted it.

Hope you enjoy.

Okay, the REVISED version is up, it's the same link.

Is it better or worse?

I thought this was great.  A quick read.  Written only in 10 minutes?  Not bad at all.  I think Daves character acts too stereotypically of the guy that's in an "Oh God I'm being tortured" situation.  I guess it's OK but maybe some dimension could be added - like psychological toying or some kind of reasoning - not just various obscenities.

I think Sam's dialogue is good but I think he should be portrayed as calmer.  Some of his random outbursts of cursing and such seem more approriate for Dave than for Sam.  But that's just me.

Overall, this was pretty good.  I was sort of expecting this to be the governement when he was wearing as suit so good twist, I suppose.
3 1/2 out of 5

to be honest it wasn't one of your best scripts.  

I dunno maybe it was the lack of actual torture?

Anyway it was okay, but I've seen you do a lot better.

Brion

I liked the revised version a lot better. Especially because of the updated timer thing.

This was a pretty awesome little torture script, and for ten minutes of writing, it could've been a lot worse.

It was a bit nasty mouth for me, but I got through it and thought it was pretty good. The ending was a bit of a...hmm...I've got mixed feelings about that. I think that there should be a "let the readers know what happened" kind of thing, but the ending in this worked pretty good. If you wanted to let the reader basically make up who won or lost, you did a pretty good job with that.

Good job!

-Chris

Thanks for reading and commenting.