When Román’s girlfriend leaves him for some guy she’d been chatting up on the internet he thought he could find out where the guy lives, with the help of his female friend Ali, and win her back. Instead of finding her in another man’s arms he finds her held captive by a pair of elderly political radicals armed with nitroglycerin, acid, and a twisted state of mind. To make matters worse Ali has fallen into their demented clutches and now both of them are trapped with no way out. Can Román save Ali and find his girlfriend, alive, or will they perish at the hands of their captors?

In the bonus features director Adrián García Bogliano talks about the history of Argentina and how during the countries dictatorship many people were taken off the streets and tortured in various ways. When democracy arrived the people responsible simply bled into the masses and were never tried for their crimes. Though many films documented this aspect of the countries history very few of them really gave people a head on look at the people who tortured, their state of mind, or the things that they had done. He wanted to bring these things to light by putting them into something “Fun”.

I’m chalking up a lot of my disregard for this film as a translation hiccup. Maybe if I was Argentinean the film would have made more sense to me in its historical aspect. The villains after all are two left over radicals from an age gone by. Sure, I’ll give the film that. Unfortunately it has too much going against it aside from just that possible issue.

For starters the weapon of choice for the villains here is nitroglycerin derived from dynamite that had gone missing in the late 70’s. They’ve found some way of extracting it into its liquid form and use it to kill their victims or keep them from escaping by slathering it on them. In one scene in the film some hair slathered in nitro falls to the ground causing an explosion but a woman covered in the stuff can crab walk, jump, and do other things? Is this stuff extremely unstable or just stable enough to allow those kinds of movements? The film doesn’t seem capable of deciding which makes this plot device easily susceptible to skepticism. Without it everything else simply falls apart.   

Another issue that I had with the film was the villains themselves. One of them is an old guy who uses a walker to get around and only has the use of one eye. The guy can’t even get up and down the stairs on his own without the help of his friend. In several scenes where you’d think Román would take the upper hand he cowers in the corner. Dude, really? The other villain seems to have issues at first getting bodies up and down a flight of stairs but when it matters he’s suddenly super strong. Try as I might to take the villains seriously I couldn’t help but think to myself the entire time, “I would have shoved that guy down the stairs right there. I would have stabbed that guy in the back right there”. There are just too many opportune moments in the film that go without action. I don’t care how shocked you are, when it comes to self preservation, at some point you do what you have to do no matter who you are.

So while Cold Sweat manages to do me the solid of not jumping into the whole torture porn thing, something I thought was bound to happen, the film is neither thrilling nor engaging. As hard as I tried to give the film some amount of leeway it simply failed to do anything but frustrate me with its cowardly characters, heinous villains, and hard to swallow plot.

*Bonus features include:

~Director’s Commentary
~Deleted Extended Scenes: Here you get over twenty minutes of unnecessary footage.
~Behind The Scenes
~Poster Gallery: There’s quite a few.
~Comic Book: Despite the film being from Argentina the comic book is in English but there are several translation hiccups even here.
~Trailer
~Teaser
~TV Spots
~Radio Spots
~Easter Egg