Severe Smut: Exploited (2022)

Exploited (2022)

Rating: ***1/2

Starring: Jordan Ver Hoeve, Andrew Matthew Welch, Makenzie Vega

On his first day at Starling University, freshman Brian (Jordan Ver Hoeve) gets assigned a shared room with another student named Jeremy (Andrew Matthew Welch) and is given a USB stick with orientation details. Later that night, after attending a campus party with Jeremy, along with Jeremy's girlfriend Lexi (Makenzie Vega) and her roommate Janelle (Hannah Rose May) for some boozy fun, Brian opted to end the evening getting his laptop ready for college use, but accidentally mixes up his USB with another identical one he found in the room. One that contains a hidden folder full of cam footages by a student who engages in kinks via video streams. Being queer, Brian is first enticed to see the collection of smut, but after the last video from the bunch have the student seemingly beaten dead by someone in a gimp mask before the footage corrupts, he's nothing short of shocked and disturbed.

Deciding to solve the mystery himself, Brian tags along his computer whiz brother to try and recover the last file to see how the attack really ended, as well as possibly uncover the identity of the gimp. As he goes deeper into the dive, though, it is made clear that whoever was responsible for the attack doesn't want him or anybody else sticking their noses where they don't belong and they're doing everything they can to stop their little snooping, from exploiting secretly recorded footages to turn them against each other, to straight out physical assaults with a mean taser.

An erotic thriller with slasher flick tendencies, Exploited (2022) focuses more on intriguing its audience with the dupable mystery behind a series of smut videos and, too, exploring the drama revolving around the sexual exploits of our characters rather than racking up a kill count. The approach works well enough as the mystery itself is well-grounded and nifty with its twists and red herrings, with most of the players involved in the psycho-sexual conundrum engagingly portrayed thus making their circumstances with the dangerous gimp all the more enthralling to watch. I do have to say that it isn't too hard to figure out who's behind the gimp mask once all the cards are laid out and the film does end rather underwhelmingly with a cliffhanger following its mid-tier reveal, though this does little to dent the strong exploitative factor of the movie, not with its seedy scenes of  homoerotic blackmail and unsettling sexual assaults acting as the story's solid source of shock value. 

With nobody really biting the big one until the climax and, even then, the bodycount runs a little short in the numbers and variety, the slasher elements mostly fall on the nature of the gimp's stalking and attacks. It's frankly practical intimidation-wise, especially when the fella shows how manipulative they can be behind text messages and chatrooms and, whenever they need to resort to physical violence, they can very much go brutal without necessarily killing a victim. It's all well said and done, though I do wish they could've at least throw in an extra body or two just to keep everyone on their toes, further showing how bad of a threat the villain is.

By the end, Exploited (2022) is an engaging thriller that daringly went into the sleazier side of the subgenre and I'm very much glad it did. It's undoubtedly not for everyone, though the less priggish may find its unconventional shot on the typical slasher chills and spills entertaining, especially when it lives up to a good enough whodunnit in the midst of all the smut and drama! 

Bodycount:

1 female shot on the gut with a shotgun

1 female brained with a rock

1 male shot with a shotgun

Total: 3