I use Torrentspy quite often and have never had any problems.A Torrent is just a name that is used for downloadable files (movies, music, etc). There are loads of sites giving acces to torrents, and I would also highly recommend www.mininova.org.
Before you can download any torrent files you will need a peice of software (called a client) which is what actually gives you the ability to download from torrent sites.
I can personally recommend Bitlord as a client, and you can download it from www.bitlord.com