Basic Trope: We Have Ways of Making You Talk. Will it be the few hundred volts way, or the few thousand?
- Straight: Alice is a spy, and her interrogator is Dr. Sadistic. He strips her topless and straps electrodes to her chest. Any time Alice refuses to answer, she gets a horrendous shock.
- Exaggerated:
- Dr. Sadistic throws the lighting bolts of Zeus at Alice to make her talk.
- Sadistic simply tries to kill Alice with his Shock and Awe powers unless she talks.
- Downplayed: Dr. Sadistic uses a carpet his bare feet to give Alice mild Static Electricity shocks when she doesn't talk.
- Justified: Alice's record was compromised, and it states the last time she was interrogated, this was how she was broken. So if it worked before...
- Inverted:
- Alice is Too Kinky to Torture, so Dr. Sadistic promises to reward Alice with shocks to her genitals.
- Alice was pretty beaten up when brought here, and somehow the electric treatments heal her wounds.
- Dr. Sadistic is a legitimate psychiatric professional (with an admittedly foreboding name) who administers electroconvulsive therapy after obtaining informed consent from Alice and providing anaesthesia. This helps Alice manage a mental illness after medication didn't work for her.
- Dr. Sadistic's assistant botched setting up the electrodes, so when Sadistic touches them against Alice's skin, his hand gets a shock instead.
- Electric Instant Gratification
- Subverted: Dr. Sadistic then removes the electrodes, and says that's not going to break Alice enough. He then forces her to listen to obnoxious tween pop for hours.
- Alice appears to endure torture before cracking after an hour and leading him and his men to a complex combination set up that she needs to decode. She gives them a code that causes a boobytrap to kill them all painfully.
- Double Subverted: Then, when she still refuses to talk after clearly in pain from the music, Dr. Sadistic just jams live wires against her chest.
- Parodied: Alice refuses to break, and then says her breasts are starting to smell like freshly cooked turkeys.
- Zig Zagged: In the aforementioned situation where Sadistic's hands get shocked, he falls over onto his female superior, and accidentally touches her chest, and she gets shocked there. So she slaps Sadistic, which also gives him a shock.
- Averted: Dr. Sadistic just whips out a checkbook when questioning Alice.
- Enforced: A car battery company had a Product Placement deal in this movie, and this is the clearest way the writers can think of to show it off.
- Lampshaded: "You're going to use that? Torture still isn't an effective way of getting information, no matter the method."
- Invoked: Alice was absent on the days when spies were taught to withstand other forms of torture, so she hints that she's vulnerable to this kind.
- Exploited: Alice's Shock and Awe powers needed a recharge, and since the villains don't know her Secret Identity, they are going to be in for a big surprise.
- Defied: Sadistic considers electrical torture to be lazy and artificial, and not a "real" way of hurting people, plus it puts a heck of a strain on the power grid, which powers up Dr. Sadistic's hideout. He will only stick with practical torturing, dammit!
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Alice's electric torture is depicted through a Scream Discretion Shot and flashing blue/yellow lights, the camera panning to Dr. Sadistic and his assistance with various looks of terror, empathy, and twisted glee.
- Deconstructed: While focused on using the electric torture to break her, Dr. Sadistic doesn't pay attention and sets the voltage too high. Alice ends up literally shocked to death, long before she even considers giving up information, and all he has to show for it is a smoldering corpse. His eagerness to break Alice results in a massive waste of time at best and inspires Alice's agency to retaliate harshly in response to one of their agents being murdered at worst.
- Played For Drama: The experience has left Alice suffering from extreme PTSD and develop multiple phobias that have prevented her from doing her job as a spy. She is more cowardly as to not get captured.
- Played For Laughs: The power keeps flickering on and off, and Dr. Sadistic expresses annoyance at it, akin to a constantly rebooting computer. Alice can only stare at him with the most bored look on her face, occasionally snarking on if he needs help.
Crap. The power went out. Send the prisoner back to the Electric Torture page.
