Nice billboard, eh? I was going to give some sort of warning for the graphic nature of these Captivity adverts, but chances are that you’ve either seen them already, and even if that’s not the case, imagine how much more offensive these would be on billboards above the restaurant or dentist’s office that you are about to enter. Perhaps you would have driven or walked past them with your children and would have awoken to their nightmares from seeing Elisha Cuthbert’s face covered in a cast and with tubes shoved up the nostrils. Although these ads have been pulled, they already appeared on 30 Los Angeles-area billboards and 1,400 New York City taxi cabs.

The adolescent finger-pointing has predictably resulted in Lionsgate blaming the movie’s marketers, After Dark, whose CEO gave a weak and ambiguous explanation that finds its mistaken origins in some drunken Vegas bender. Or something like that.

One of the more pathetic aspects of this movie’s buzz is the “Love Story” angle:

The film is set in Manhattan and will feature Cuthbert as a fashion model who, along with a chauffeur, gets kidnapped and held in a small room by a serial killer. While the psycho methodically terrorizes them, the victims draw strength from each other and fall in love.

What in the holy hell were these filmakers thinking? That kind of romance never works out long term. Even more revolting (if that’s possible) is the desperate “Female Empowerment” spin:

[T]he images on the billboard are not an accurate representation of the film, which stars Cuthbert as a woman who awakens to find herself being held in a cellar. This movie is certainly a horror movie and it’s about abduction, but it’s also about female empowerment.

Obviously, “Abduction,” “Confinement,” “Torture,” and “Termination” are the least recognizable forms of female empowerment, and only the highly enlightened souls at After Dark and Lionsgate are cool enough to “get it.” As far as the mistake excuse goes, when that much advertising money is at stake, billboard campaigns don’t regularly proceed without MPAA approval. This campaign was a defiant attempt to capitalize on the trend that Pajiba has dubbed “torture porn” – Saw, Hostel, and the like. Yet none of those movies pushed into mainstream billboard territory but instead stuck with context-appropriate theatre and print adverts sort of like the slightly artsy Captivity posters that The Blemish has posted. If only they had stopped at that.

Eyewitness billboard photos courtesy of Trannies In Trouble.