Botched is one of the strangest movies I’ve seen in quite some time, a twisted dark comedy/horror brimming with gore.  Initially the film starts out as an action caper with Stephen Dorff playing Ritchie, a professional thief for hire.  Ritchie owes a dept to a Russian crime boss and he’s given one final job to clear his debt.  He has to steal a priceless crucifix from a posh Moscow high-rise apartment.  Ritchie is paired with Russian brothers loud-mouthed Peter and simpleton Yuri.  Everything goes according to plan until Peter decides to kill one of the people in the apartment as the trio makes their getaway.

As they try to flee down on the elevator, the car keeps stopping to pickup more passengers including a trio of religious zealots, a security guard, a wannabe reporter, a nerd, and a beautiful business executive.  Their escape is cutoff when the elevator abruptly stops on the buildings hidden 13^th floor.  This is where the mayhem begins as the group finds themselves trapped without any escape on a floor filled with deadly traps, someone controlling all the cameras and elevators, and a nut dressed like Ivan the Terrible, running around with a very sharp sword.

Ritchie and Anna (the executive) play the only two normal people in a group filled with eccentrics.  The security guard, Boris (Geoff Bell) claims to be a former member of the Special Forces but every idea blows up in his face.  The religious fanatics led by Sonya, make Christian Fundamentalists seem positively tame.  Half the fun is watching these crazies interact with each other.  Boris soon has Dmitry (the reporter), following him around like some adoring fan, going along with one ridiculous plan after another.    Peter verbally abuses his timid brother Yuri and the latter only musters the courage to fight back when his brother steals his sandwich.  Exasperated Ritchie is pushed to the point where he’d just assume shoot all of them rather than put up with the nonsense.  However, Ritchie is determined to find the control room to get the elevator running again so he and Anna can escape the building, the lunatics that are running rampant.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting when I started watching Botched but I certainly wasn’t expecting this kind of over-the-top farce.  It’s bloody, but it’s often a funny bloody.  When the nerd gets his head cut off early on, Peter walks back to the rest of the group, holding the dead as if it were a discarded piece of trash.  Not everything works…there’s a running gag about a giant rat that looks like a prop from a 1950s horror film that even in tongue-in-cheek, gets old pretty quickly. 

Dorff plays the straight man and allows others characters to steal the show.  Bronagh Gallagher is wonderful as the controlling fire and brimstone Sonya.  Geoff Bell steals the show as Boris.  He gets the best lines in the film and each one is so dumb you can’t help but laugh.  Also kudos to the jazzy 70’s style soundtrack, which was so out of place that, it actually worked.  Botched is one of those films that viewers are likely to really like or really hate.  It’s just good, stupid fun!