Stuck: Critic Reviews

Stuart Gordon, the mostly under-the-radar director of Re-Animator, pops back into view with this amusing trifle -- a piece of scuzzy tabloid noir.

Stuck, while not strictly a horror film, is steeped in gore and carries a seam of mocking gallows humor as relentless as that of Sweeney Todd.

With a little more ingenuity, a few more evilly funny lines and a more interestingly written role for its female lead, this could have been a minor cult classic.

The over-the-top tale becomes a tense and unsettling duel. This is not enjoyable entertainment, but it is brutally watchable. Writer/director Stuart Gordon seeks to expose our uncaring, self-absorbed society and also the unflagging will to live.

The question is why the time, talent and treasure of such energetic and even gifted artists have been marshaled in such a disgusting and trivial genre exercise and what viewers are supposed to get out of it. Isn't life hard enough?

Stuck is both darkly comic and disgusting; the name alone reduces the crime to a sick joke.

A taut drama that manages to be thoughtful without forgetting it's a creep-out.

It's a grueling little noirish thriller with slasher-worthy gore.

As the title of this splatter comedy by writer-director Stuart Gordon indicates, he's like a bug stuck to her windshield, and that's about the level of humanity and insight one can expect here.

A quick and nasty social satire that comes with the 'inspired by a true story' avowal, Stuck melds horror and humor as it offers a literally lacerating portrait of humankind at its worst.

Deliciously twisted and divinely ill, Stuck does everything a good horror movie should: It contrasts the insane and the mundane, it reflects the social condition, and it offers jolt after jolt of gory surprise.

There's no shortage of scenes that you'll watch through your fingers, groaning -- but you'll watch all the same.

Ingeniously nasty and often shockingly funny.

Stuart Gordon's gorily amusing Stuck is essentially a B-movie with a single joke, albeit a pretty good -- if admittedly sick -- one.

Stuck lost me the moment it started going for cheap laughs. Are we really meant to snicker at his suffering and at this awful, awful woman?

Stuck gives a boost to the dramatic elements of the story, while preserving the stern lesson about a society crumbling under the weight of self-interest and moral decay.

You might hope for fiction to bring insight to senseless cruelty, rather than augment the ignominy of the original crime.

Grandiose claims have been made in some quarters for this nasty, economical little film, but it does what it sets out to do pretty well.

Whether it's worth the price of a ticket is a matter of individual taste and whether there's sufficient interest in the premise to excuse the hit-and-miss execution.

Darkly funny morality tale for mature gore lovers.

A compact, lurid tabloid item that blows the lid off mundane human insensitivity

You could see it all as a darkly bizarre tale that just might be true

It's a shaggy-dog story that spirals into garage Grand Guignol, with Suvari and Rea well-matched in uneasy roles.

While it'll certainly make you wince, Gordon's slapsticky execution and misguided injections of humour serve only to bleed the situation of suspense. What emerges is not so much horror as a grisly farce.

Stuck is disturbing in all the right ways, turning an incredible real-life story of human callousness and suffering into a tawdry entertainment that makes guffawing, sociopathic rubbernecks of us all.