TITLE & REVIEW
A young woman becomes a resident
in an elitist apartment block.
She quickly discovers that the place has lots of rules,
and enforces them with very extreme measures.
Lewis (Luke Evans -
Dracula Untold
) abducts
Kelly Reilly
, and holds her prisoner in a secret cell that measures ten feet squared.
He wants information out of her,
but while he has apparently planned for the abduction
he is not necessarily prepared for an interrogation.
This features a lot of English actors. However, the cars are left-hand drive and the police uniforms are American. Possibly this was shot in the UK but set in the USA, like Red Mist .
The man is physically prepared, but not mentally. The woman is actually a better fighter than him, but she fails to take his handgun from him on several occasions. The man is equally absent-minded, as he actually forgot to give his cleaning lady the day off.
This was directed by a woman, but written by Noel Clarke ( Doctor Who (2005) ). He even has a cameo at the start, as a cafe waiter with a dodgy attempt at an American accent. This is not his best work, either as an actor or a writer.
A German airliner takes off with Tobias Ellis (Joseph Gordon Levitt -
Inception
) as the copilot. A terrorist gang tries a 9/11-style hijacking,
and Tobias ends up stuck in the cockpit
with an injured terrorist and a dead pilot.
The rest of the gang are locked outside, trying to get in.
The result is a high-stakes, high-pressure story
that takes place in a very confined space.
The story takes a different note when Tobias is trapped with the youngest of the hijackers. The tension comes from a different source - while originally it was about the pilot inside and the hijackers outside, now the hijacker is inside and the police are outside. A nice way to keep the story going by adapting the same theme to a different angle.
A couple of tweenage girls end up hitch-hiking to a music concert.
They hitch a lift with a couple of tweenage males who have a flashy sports car.
Unfortunately they crash off the road,
and end up trapped in the wreck in the middle of nowhere.
As if the situation is not terrible enough, a thriller subplot is added. It turns out that the car belongs to a criminal organisation, and a hit-man is sent to retrieve their property.
A man wakes up in a hospital bed.
His doctor (Angus Macfadyen -
Braveheart
) seems a cheery sort, albeit a bit unbalanced.
Remember, Macfadyen was last seen as a victim in one of the
Saw
Franchise, so we can base our expectations on that.
There is a woman in the next bed. She, like the male patient, has amnesia. This is all a bit similar to 10 Cloverfield Lane , with three characters trapped together and no trust between them.
There is an end-credits sequence, but it really does not add anything to the story.
A young woman is driving across the USA towing a u-haul trailer.
She finds herself being menaced by another driver.
The protagonist encounters a hunter (Anthony Heald - Silence of the Lambs ). Since the actor is a well-known rent-a-villain, how long will it be before he turns out to be evil? Or is this a fake-out, like the deliberate casting of the Tom Berenger/Sidney Poitier film?
A secret US prison called the Temple,
used for interrogation of political prisoners,
loses contact with the outside world.
Wesley Snipes (
Blade
) and his Special Forces team, including
Anne Heche
, are sent in to investigate.
They discover all the guards are dead,
and the rescue team gets trapped inside too.
The CCTV tapes indicate that most of the guards died from blue-on-blue or suicide. However, it also seems that something invisible might have killed them. Predator (1987) , anyone? Something starts to kill the team, one at a time.
Ty Hackett (Columbus Short -
), a decorated US military veteran,
gets a job with his buddy Mike Cochrane (Matt Dillon -
A Kiss Before Dying
). They work as security guards for a bank cash transport firm
run by Duncan Ashcroft (Fred Ward -
Remo: Unarmed And Dangerous
). The team is Baines (Laurence Fishburne -
The Matrix
), Quinn (Jean Reno -
Godzilla
), Palmer (Amaury Nolasco -
) and Dobbs (Skeet Ulrich -
Scream
). This is a great mix of different racial identity choices:
Black (Fishburne), Latinx (Nolasco) and French (Reno).
The team decide to fake a hijacking incident, and take forty-two million dollars cash for themselves. Hackett, the new guy, is on the fence.
Inevitably something goes wrong. The new guy gets locked inside an armoured car.
The ante gets upped when a local police officer, Eckehart (Milo Ventimiglia - Heroes ), decides to investigate.
This starts in an Eastern European country,
where one group of Slavic thugs are ethnically cleansing their neighbours.
It seems to have been inspired by the 1990s breakup of the former Yugoslavia,
but a few years later it now looks more reminiscent of the 2022 Ukraine invasion.
A British Special Forces unit wipes out the Slavic militia. This is unfortunate, because the Slavs have more personality than the Brits. The Special Forces unit is imaginatively nicknamed Hell's Bastards, presumably a reference to a certain Quentin Tarantino movie. It has four women and a token black guy, but they are all pretty bland. Compare this with something like Dog Soldiers and you will see how important it is to have likeable characters.
The problem from a practical in-story standpoint is that the leader is a by-the-book idiot who takes orders literally. When he is told kill everyone in the camp he automatically includes civilians and hostages. Yes, no matter how valuable they might prove to be he just decides to kill every single person.
When the team get back to the UK, they have to get debriefed on the top floor of their headquarters. The elevator is broken, so they start to climb the stairs. This is the start of a never-ending climb, with a supernatural entity following them from below.
The only exits lead them through a time portal back to the massacre at the start, where they are doomed to watch their younger selves repeat the same mistakes. They try to change history, making the obligatory references to Back To The Future 2 .
This was filmed in Winnipeg, Canada,
although it seems supposed to be set in a major financial centre like Wall Street.
The story concerns three yuppies who work in an investment firm called Starkweather Financial, a reference to the real-life spree-killer Charlie Starkweather. One night they drive home together from the annual office Xmas party. Unfortunately they stop off at a bank's ATM booth to get some cash. Much like Colin Farrell in Phone Booth, they end up trapped in a confined space by an unknown attacker.
The protagonists, as always in this kind of film, lack intelligence. There are three of them, but their ideas tend to involve going one at a time rather than all at once. Alice Eve is the biggest name in the cast. However, all she does is hang around and look pretty.
One might assume that this is also the worst night of the criminal's life too. After all, the poor man is just trying to burglarise the cash vault when witnesses start lining up in order to get killed. However, it turns out he cares more about terrorising the yuppies than anything else.
There is no after-credits sequence, not in the traditional sense of providing exposition or setting up the story for a sequel. Instead there are scenes cut into the credits which depict the killer studying random maps and blueprints of buildings. Nothing really suspenseful, however.
Once upon a time there was a tree that a hangman used to publicly execute criminals.
Apparently the local carpenter ran out of good trees,
because he chopped the hanging tree down
and used the lumber to build a beautiful four-poster bed.
The story picks up in the modern era, when a couple of cops are sent to investigate multiple suspicious deaths at a sex club. It turns out there was a previous homicide in that room, and a suicide a year earlier. This all sounds a bit like 1408 .
We then flash back to earlier that night, when the victims got together on the bed. They were two couples seeking to act out a celebratory foursome. Unfortunately they start to hallucinate, and worse. Anyone who gets off the bed is in trouble, and their phones are all plugged in to be recharged. Since it is a sex club, the room probably has a reasonable amount of soundproofing. All in all, they are in a bad situation.
The film switches back and forth, starting with the police investigation and then flashing back to the incident being investigated. Every time the cops identify one of the victims, they turn out to have some kind of criminal record It seems like the haunted bed has a specific type of victim. It also has a powerful range, and can lure in victims who are outside the room.
Things get really interesting when the survivors manage to contact the cop who is investigating the incident they are still stuck in. They literally send text messages on their phones back and fro through time. How haunted lumber causes a time warp is not apparent, but it certainly seems an original addition to a played-out concept.
To make things more complicated, the investigating detective has a shady history of his own. He is an alcoholic and he shot a suspect who was running away. Will he be judged by the bed?
Coal-miner Jeff Fahey (
Planet Terror
) is on his last day at work before he retires.
His tweenage daughter tags along, in a bring your daughter to work day way.
She is obviously the Final Girl of the story.
Her pretext is to make a going-away video, but this is not a found footage effort.
Instead it is Faux Footage, relying on handheld camera-work
to fool the viewer into thinking it is found footage.
The mine suffers from a cave-in. The miners are trapped together, and claustrophobic suspense sets in. Things get pushed up a notch when they discover an abandoned tunnel. This gives us a potential Death-Line scenario, in which the survivors might be pursued by blind albino cannibals who were descended from miners trapped there a century ago.
There is also a chance that the survivors are halucinating due to oxygen deprivation, or that a pocket of noxious gas has ruptured and is causing their symptoms.
This is set in smalltown USA in the 1970s,
before the Stranger Danger panic of the 1990s prevented parents
from letting their kids walk home from school unaccompanied.
That said, in this particular town four kids have gone missing without trace.
The police are asking for witnesses,
but they really are not making much progress.
The Grabber (Ethan Hawke -
Gattacca
) drives around in the creepiest-looking van imaginable,
picking up little boys, and nobody stops him.
The protagonist is a regular boy named Finney whose best friend is abducted. The good news is that his sister has psychic dreams. The bad news is that their father (Jeremy Davies - The Infernal Machine ) is an abusive alcoholic. In all fairness, his character has more depth that just those traits. However, the movie hinges on adult incompetence so that the children can save the day. That said, this is not a childrens movie. The subject matter is distasteful, and the psychic sister swears like a sailor.
Finney becomes the Grabber's sixth victim. He is trapped in a basement, and fed nothing but scrambled eggs. There is an old-fashioned black phone on the wall, and although it is not connected it still rings. Finney ends up using it to commune with the ghosts of the previous victims. Each gives him tips on how to escape.
The result is a decent thriller, not without its flaws but still quite enjoyable.
This starts on the morning of D-Day, 6th June 1944.
A group of slave workers are building a blockhouse,
part of the German Atlantic Wall defences on the coast of Normandy.
When the Allied fleet arrives and shells the defences,
seven of the men seek shelter in the tunnels
and are trapped when the roof caves in.
The good news is that there is enough wine, cheese and sausages to feed an army.
The bad news is that nobody knows that they are there,
and they cannot expect a rescue attempt.
The men have nothing better to do than invent ways to pass the time, hoping to keep their spirits up - like in Red Dwarf . But despite the fact that one of their number is Peter Sellers ( The Pink Panther ), this is not played for laughs. It is a depressingly grim drama, which consists of the men watching each other slowly die. The one glimmer of hope comes from the title card at the start, which states that this is based on a true story and that a couple of them survived ...
Jeremy Reins (Stephen Dorff -
Blade
) wakes up locked in a darkened box.
He is trapped in the trunk of a car,
and the only light source is the LED of a clock that is counting down.
His only communication with the outside is on a CB radio that someone left there ...
and the person on the other end is a fellow abductee.
He is a US Secret Service agent, and his abductor (Pruitt Taylor Vince -
Captivity
) wants to know the location of the US President's secret bunker.
The man on the other end of the CB radio, Henry (JR Bourne -
Teen Wolf
), is another high-level US government operative
being sweated for the same information.
Jeremy manages to get a hold of the kidnapper's cell-phone. When he phones home, his wife ( Chyler Leigh ) gets abducted too. The 911 emergency phone operator ( Kali Rochon ) tries to help, but Jeremy does not bother giving her the most important facts up front.
Things take a twist like something out of the TV show 24 when Jeremy discovers how complex the terrorists' plan is. Not only are there multiple kidnappings of Government officials, but the terrorists are putting car-bombs at key locations in Washington DC. To be economical, the bombs are in the same cars as the hostages. This is a great cost-saving measure, and takes Jeremy's personal jeopardy to the next level. The big red digital clock is counting down towards zero.
Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds -
Deadpool
) wakes up bound and gagged in a wooden crate
that has been buried in a desert.
Luckily his captors left him a Blackberry cell-phone,
so he can provide exposition through a series of phone-calls.
Paul's abductor wants the US government to pay five million dollars. Of course, the US does not negotiate with terrorists - well, at least not since Ronnie Reagan and Colonel Oliver North got caught in the Iran-Contra affair. As a result, Paul's only hope of survival is rescue.
Between calls with his rescue contact, Paul also makes more personal phone calls in an effort to contact his wife Linda ( Samantha Mathis ). His Employer's HR manager (Stephen Tobolowsky - Heroes ) contacts him in order to weasel out of the company's financial commitment to his family in the event of his death. Their grounds for this cost-saving measure is his alleged breach of a non-fraternisation clause in his employment contract. This pre-#MeToo clause, standard in every industry except for Entertainment, is the perfect excuse for the employer to disown their expendable worker.
The result is a tense drama. However, this film came out around the same time as 127 Hours which has a similar premise - young man trapped alone - and was far more critically and financially successful.
Final Girl
Briana Evigan
and her young brother spend the night alone.
Their creepy stepfather (Garret Dillahunt -
Sarah Connor Chronicles
) has spent their savings on a bengal tiger so he can open a safari ranch.
The house is shuttered up because a tropical storm is about to hit.
The tiger has gotten loose inside the house.
The title is taken from the poem Tyger, Tyger by William Blake. As a result, it should be obvious what the story is about.
Victoria (
Shannon Sossymon
) goes to Paris to visit her sister Carolyn (
Alecia Moore AKA Pink
). Unfortunately our heroine has a nervous disposition
(including lots of prescription medicine for it),
while her sister and her French friends are jerks with a taste for practical jokes.
They take her to an illegal rave club in the catacombs ...
The protagonist ends up trapped alone, wandering through the unmapped tunnels.
A con-man (Frank Grillo -
Captain America: Winter Soldier
) gets himself arrested so he can be safe in a police cell.
However, a hit-man (Gerard Butler -
Olympus Has Fallen
) gets himself put in the next cell.
A female cop has to keep them apart.
The con-man has an open contract on his head. This means that there is at least one other hit-man after him, along with a gaggle of corrupt cops and anyone else who might want easy money. However, as the bodies pile up the money is not so easy.
This is based on the film
Cube (1999)
, but is told from the perspective of the security Jobsworths
running surveillance on the inmates.
If this sounds familiar,
it may have been the inspiration for
Cabin In The Woods
.
Management sent in a troubleshooter - the Doctor from Being Erica .
Australian naval officer John Ingram (Sam Neill -
Jurassic Park
) and his much younger wife Rae (
Nicole Kidman
) go on a yachting holiday together,
to get over the loss of their young son.
The grieving couple encounter another yacht, the Orpheus,
with its only inhabitant Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane -
Titanic
).
Hughie gives an account of what went wrong aboard the Orpheus, with him the sole survivor of an apparent case of mass food poisoning. When John goes over in an attempt to salvage things, it becomes obvious that this is not the complete truth. Now Rae must battle not only for her own survival, but to rescue her husband.
Director Philip Noyce delivers a well-shot thriller that led on to him doing bigger movies in Hollywood USA. The thriller's biggest mystery is ... how did the two leads get married? Their twenty-year age-gap means Neill was almost twice Kidman's age at the time of filming, far from the half-your-age-plus-seven standard which movies usually prefer. Perhaps it was to make it more of a love triangle, since Zane is much closer to Kidman's age. Something else to note is that Kidman gets the lead role, so the Producers probably added Neill in the supporting role as he was the biggest star they could get at the time.
Half a dozen tweenagers drive long-distance across the USA.
They get a flat tire in the middle of nowhere,
so they get out to stretch their legs.
Unfortunately they are in the sights of a murderous sniper.
The police, predictably, do a terrible job. Their plan is to use the victims as bait.
The story is set aboard trans-Pacific flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo.
The pilot is Captain Peter Haining (Jonathan Schaech -
Dark Circles
), and the cabin crew are Stewardesses Laura Baxter (
Leslie Bibb
) and Suzy Lee (
Jamie Chung
). However, all is not good news.
The in-flight movie is
Terror At 30,000 Feet
- the Bill Shatner version of the story from
Twilight Zone: The Movie
.
Passengers Brad Martin (Ryan Kwanten - True Blood ) and his wife ( Amy Smart ) start to get suspicious when other people start to go missing. Unfortunately for the audience, the kills are bloodless and off-screen.
Why did this movie flop without trace? After all, it has a handful of recognisable TV actors. Well, perhaps the incredibly generic title is part of the problem. Remember when Snakes On A Plane was going to be released under the title of the flight number? Hardly anything the audience could get enthusiastic about seeing.
Aaron Ashmore (
Smallville
) and a couple of friends hang out at a ski resort in the Canadian Rockies.
They sneak onto the last ski lift of the night,
but it gets shut down early due to an arctic storm moving in.
They get trapped mid-air, a dozen metres above the ground.
Nobody will come back to the resort for the next five days.
This is much in the vein of Open Water , based on the true story about the SCUBA divers accidentally left at the Great Barrier Reef. The protagonists are isolated and vulnerable. Time is of the essence - if they do not get back to safety, they will freeze to death. Land-sharks, in the shape of Canadian wolves, are circling.
The tropes of this genre require that the protagonists do idiotic things.
This is a geezer-teaser,
the kind of thing Johnny Drama would have made in Entourage.
Bruce Willis must have been unavailable,
because a couple of roles seem to have been written for him
if we compare this to the
Bruce Willis geezer-teaser
subgenre.
A former computer hacker (Kevin Dillon - ), now working as an office drone, discovers he has a bomb under his office chair. A shadowy figure with a voice modifier calls him to give him orders, coercing him to hack a bank's security systems.
The senior bomb dispiosal technician (Mel Gibson - Mad Max ) and his sidekick (Crab Man from My name Is Earl) turn up to help. The police chief ( Shannen Doherty ) is neither particularly obstructive nor helpful.
A man and his wife pay an unexpected visit to his childhood home
- a remote mansion that his brother still lives in.
Unfortunately the brother is reluctant to let his visitors stay.
Almost as if he has a guilty secret to hide.
The brother has a man locked up in the basement. A man who he believes is the Devil incarnate. Is the brother crazy, or is he right?
Jess (
Ella-Rae Smith
) lives in a small port town in England.
One night she hooks up with a handsome American stranger (Matthew Daddario -
) on his yacht, and wakes up to find she has taken her on a romantic trip.
They spend forever having a romantic time together.
The bliss is interrupted by the arrival of Lexi ( Jessica Alexander ), a party girl. However, it seems she has an agenda of her own. This ends up as a gender-reversed Dead Calm situation. Will Jess stay with the one who has given her the best sex of her life, or will she help the violently unstable psychopath?
This was made on a tiny budget, with only three main speaking roles. In part this is because it is from the CoVid lockdown era, but also because it was made for a streaming service on a TV budget as opposed to a Hollywood one.
Director
Richard Lester
delivers a film that encompasses three different 1970s genres
and gives them a particularly British feel.
The result is somewhat dated,
but it is a very impressive film and quite watchable.
The first genre is disaster, as in the movie Poseidon Adventure . The ship's Captain (Omar Sharif - One Night With The King ) has to sail his passenger liner into a storm. Worse, his ship has been sabotaged and might sink. The entertainments officer (Roy Kinnear - Three Musketeers ) does everything he can to raise the passengers spirits, while he himself is falling apart under the strain. Azad the steward (Roshan Seth - Bourne Identity ) looks after the passengers as much as he can, allowing for further diversity and humanity.
The second genre is crime thriller, as the Detective Inspector (Anthony Hopkins - Silence of the Lambs ) investigates a case of extortion by terror - as in the movie Dirty Harry. Nicholas Porter, Managing director of the shipping line, is extorted by a criminal codenamed Juggernaught who has put seven bombs aboard the cruise liner. Hopkins and Detective Brown ( Kenneth Colley ) try to find the bomber before his devices explode.
The third genre is Action-Adventure, as Tony Fallon (Richard Harris - Harry Potter ) and his team of Royal Navy bomb disposal experts are parachuted into the storm. Charlie Braddock (David Hemmings - Deep Red ) is Fallon's sidekick, while Commander Marder (Julian Glover - Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ) oversees things from the control room in London. This storyline boils down to an incredibly nail-biting climax as Fallon has to decide - to cut the red wire or the blue one ...
The film has an amazing cast of very recognisable faces, who each make the most of their small roles. By modern standards it is very apparent the main cast are virtually all CIS-passing white-looking men. Well, it is based on a true story. It certainly does not pass the Bechdel test - there are only a couple of female characters and they are all love interests of male characters. But despite their whiteness and masculinity, the cast acquit themselves well. Harris was something of an action star in the 1970s, the British equivalent of Burt Reynolds. He and Hopkins both starred in adaptations of Alistair MacLean novels - Golden Rendezvous and When 8 Bells Toll respectively. On a similar note, Glover and Colley both went on to play senior Imperial officers in The Empire Strikes Back .
This is more of a psychological suspense thriller than a slasher film.
The first Act introduces the characters and the situation.
Basically, some tweenage Americans go hiking on a remote mountainside in the Ukraine.
One of them stands on a pressure-release landmine,
and the others try to save him without getting anyone killed or maimed.
The second Act ratchets up the pressure. A local man, a poacher, stumbles across the beleaguered Yanks. He can help them, but what he takes in return might be too much.
The third Act is a climactic piece of vengeance. An unexpected survivor takes an unexpected revenge on an unexpected person, with violently unexpected results. However, by this stage there are no characters left about whom we might actually care. At its heart, this is just another empty soulless revenge film.
Joely Richardson
lives with her teenage daughter and wheelchair-bound catatonic husband
in a remote farmhouse in England.
One dark and story night there is a knock at their door.
Before you can say Who on Earth can that be?
they open the door and help the injured men outside.
The strangers survived a car crash,
but there is a lot more to their story than they let on.
This kind of story has been done before, and all that is different is the setting. Without giving too much away, basically nobody is really what they appear to be.
Maggie (
Mena Suvari
) works in a secure storage facility in Pennsylvania USA.
For some reason they do not pay her enough
for her to afford monthly rent on a room in a dodgy motel.
She takes her teenage daughter to work at night,
with the intention of borrowing money from the petty cash
in order to pay the rent.
Unfortunately, someone else got there first.
Ross (Manny Perez) and Mel (Jeff Fahy - Lost ), a pair of diamond thieves, have stashed their loot in the facility. Now they want it back.
A rough customer, Harris (Costas Mandylor - ), pops up to thicken the plot.
This was written and directed by one person. As a result, the mediocre writing is balanced with cinematography that consists almost entirely of medium shots. In other words, the only bits that are unpredictable are the bits where it is hard to work out what is going on.
A mother (
Alicia Silverstone
) discovers that her ex-husband (Richard Armitage -
Robin Hood
) intends to marry his new girlfriend,
Grace (
Riley Keogh
). The mother's response to this is so extreme and shockingly violent
that the father gets custody of the pre-teen children.
That Xmas, father is working so he leaves the children with Grace. Not in their regular suburban home, but the Cabin in the Woods . Worse, the kids have found a Sinister type home movie of Grace's childhood - with her father, a Cult leader who led a mass suicide event.
This bears the hallmarks of a Covid lock-down movie, although it was released the year before the lock-down took place. Isolation is a key feature of horror movies, and we are reminded of this when Grace lets the kids watch The Thing (1982) . After all, they are trapped in an icy wilderness. Also, it shows that she is either the best stepmother or the worst.
Just when the disrupted family's mistrust is at its highest level, something unusual happens. With their route to safety gone, they must try to work together and trust each other. Either there is a hostile, potentially supernatural force at work … or one of the main characters is trying to drive the others insane.
Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington -
Clash of the Titans
) steps onto the ledge of the twelfth storey
of a hotel in uptown New York City.
He specifically requests Lydia Mercer (
Elizabeth Banks
) as the negotiator.
Meanwhile, telejournalist Suzie Morales (
Kyra Sedgewick
) gets in everyone's way.
Nick is an ex-cop who was convicted of robbing a corrupt billionaire, David Englander (Ed Harris - ). Meanwhile, Nick's brother Joey (Jamie Bell - Fantastic Four ) and Joey's girlfriend Angie ( Genesis Rodriguez ) are involved in a heist on Englander's vault. Yes, this has elements of The Inside Man .
The police may be corrupt. Suspects include Detective Jack Dougherty (Ed Burns - ), boss-man Dante Marcus (Titus Welliver - ) and Nick's former partner Mike Ackerman (Anthony Mackie - Captain America: Winter Soldier ). Yes, this has elements of The Negotiator .
The result is a mediocre thriller that combines aspects of other films. Nothing outstanding.
This starts with William (Lochlyn Munro -
Jason vs Freddy
) and his girlfriend hanging out in a Smart House.
Unfortunately Margaux, the AI running the place,
is less than friendly.
The main story concerns a bunch of tweenage college kids. The good news is that instead of going to a Cabin in the Woods , they are going to the Smart House. The bad news is that the college kids are Canadian nobodies. The exceptions are Lexi the influencer ( Vanessa Morgan ) and Clay the stoner (Richard Harmon - Continuum ).
The AI has a 3-D display system - not a hologram, but a mimetic nanite gel that Margaux controls. When she kills people, in elaborate Final Destination methods, she can then replace them with duplicates. Luckily, the Final Girl is a computer expert who knows how to fight an AI.
All in all, this is pretty unoriginal. The idea has been done before, and this is not the best version of it.
Lisa (
Gaia Weiss
), a French waitress, hitches a lift with a nightwatchman named Adam (Peter Franzen -
Vikings
). Although they are both Europeans, they speak in English most of the time.
From good exposition through dialogue we quickly learn two things about them.
She is borderline suicidal because of the death of her daughter,
and he matches the description of a local serial killer.
Lisa wakes up in cell, and has to crawl through a series of interconnected tubes. Yes, this is basically Cube on a much more limited budget. She has been given a wrist bracelet that illuminates the tube, and gives a countdown whenever a boobytrap is about to be activated. This certainly makes her prove that she wants to stay alive. However, she does not make any effort to gather useful tools or to make alliances with other inmates. Instead she adopts an atavistic winner-takes-all approach.
There is a twist at the midpoint that just asks more questions than it answers. The maze of tubes and boobytraps is much higher technology than anything a nightwatchman with too much time on his hands could accomplish.
Would this film work if the roles were gender-flipped, with Luke being abducted by Anna? Unfortunately a reactive protagonist looks weak if they are male. For example, Ryan Reynolds ( Deadpool ) did a similar movie about a man who has been buried alive.
A US military sniper (Armie Hammer -
Man from U.N.C.L.E.
) is on an assassination mission in the middle of a desert.
He gets trapped in a minefield,
and starts halucinating.
The locals reveal that to pass through the minefield they walk in a zig-zag line. This is actually a magnificent practical example of the three choices paradox.
A bunch of tweenagers on a camping trip have been wiped out by murderous mud.
The survivors get to a remote house, and one of them goes for help.
One of the characters does what is de rigeur of any modern horror movie,
and lists all the tropes that will probably befall them.
In all fairness, the movie goes to reasonable lengths in trying to avoid the old cliches,
if only by replacing them with new cliches instead.
The characters in this have got to be the most idiotic and unlikeable morons in any serious horror movie. There have been multiple fatalities, so one man goes to get help. When he gets to the nearest bar he does not go to the barman and use the telephone to get an ambulance for his dying friends. Instead he worries that his shirt might not be pretty to look at, and then he phones his buddy to give them a lift home in his car. The car only seats four passengers, but there are five survivors.
There are a bunch of bald-headed naked albinos living in the woods. They start to murder the survivors, for no apparent reason. They have not bothered to murder anyone on any previous occasions, or the cops would have been involved. Just like the murderous mud, this is never explained.
The cast includes one former Playboy Playmate, but pretty much all the female cast members disrobe at one point or another in the story.
A former US police officer (Jason London -
Mallrats
) is hired as a night watchman at a mysterious building in Bulgaria.
He basically gets paid to lock the gates at night
and then spend eight hours watching the video screens.
The most important thing is the vault in the basement, which has ancient Enochian writing on it. Yes, it seems to be imprisoning something terrible. The guard has nightmares, perhaps caused by whatever is inside. Well, his wife suicided herself (like in Event Horizon ) so it could just be his own PTSD.
When things get creepy, he calls for help. The boss sends a consultant – the retired ex-guard (Robert Englund - Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) ).
Darby is an inmate at a drug rehab facility.
When she gets word that her mother is dying,
our heroine (no pun intended) breaks out
and tries to drive across the Rockie Mountains to Salt Lake City.
The Rockie mountains are shut because of a blizzard, or at least the road through them is. Darby hides out in a truckstop with a strange bunch, including Ed the ex-Marine (Dennis Haysbert - ) and his wife Sandi ( Dale Dickey ). However, it turns out that one of them is a crook. Someone has a young girl tied up in the back of a van.
The strangers are stuck together in the blizzard, like The Hateful Eight . The villain reveal is done pretty early on, so most of the film is actually generic fem-jep. All in all, exciting if not original.
A young woman (
Emily Tenant
) has been recently paroled from prison,
so her parole officer gets her a job working the night shift in a 24-hour convenience store.
Even though she is an ex-convict
she is allowed to work alone and unsupervised on her first night,
where she has to contend with unruly customers and the like.
The protagonist was convicted for domestic violence - attempted murder as she set her boyfriend on fire. She believes that her boyfriend was a serial killer, and that he made her watch him murder other women. Now she is on psychiatric medication because she halucinates about him.
Meanwhile, in a series of cut-aways to scenes where the protagonist is not present, a hooded figures is bumping off supporting characters. This may be intended to ramp up the tension, but it severely detracts from the main storyline of the protagonist slowly descending into insanity.
The one aspect of this film that really impresses is its use of Chekov's Gun. It is established at the start of the film that the store-owner is a deer-hunter, so it is reasonable to assume there may be a gun on the premises. However, the climax is both foreshadowed and unexpected.
A young woman (
Rachel Blanchard
) is going through a divorce so she puts her house up for sale.
She becomes a Final Girl, held hostage in her own basement
by a couple of serial killers.
This movie features a real-life couple, recognisable from the TV show True Blood . The protagonist's best friend is Anna Paquin , whose real-life husband Stephen Moyer ( Jersey Devil ) - using his real English accent - plays the protagonist's ex-husband.
The real killers are an entirely different couple. Tricia Helfer struts around in a bikini, while her lover messes with a video camera.
Meg Altman (
Jodie Foster
) and her daughter Sarah (
Kristen Stewart
) spend the night together in their new house.
The estate agent, Evan Kurtlander (Ian Buchanan -
) has advised them of the house's best feature -
a secure Panic Room that will keep them safe
in the even of a home invasion.
Just as well ...
Burnham (Forest Whitaker - Rogue One ) and Junior (Jared Leto - Suicide Squad ) break into the place in order to raid the safe. Since every heist crew needs a Mr Blonde, Junior brought along his gun-toting buddy Raoul (Dwight Yoakam - ). Thus a simple burglary gets escalated to a terrifying hostage scenario.
Mother and daughter get trapped in the panic room. Luckily it is fully stocked, and even has a toilet. There is a wall of cathode-ray TV sets for the house's CCTV cameras, a throwback to an era before such things could be done by an app on a digital smart-phone. The bad news is that Burnham installed the safe ... and the panic room it is inside.
David Fincher delivered this a couple of years after his awesome Fight Club was a critical and financial failure. In contrast this is a much smaller film, with a tiny cast on a very light location. However, Fincher puts his own visual spin on things.
A weird loner (Dominic Monaghan -
Lost
) develops an obsession with a waitress (
Ksenia Solo
). He ends up kidnapping her and keeping her in a cage
in the basement of his workplace, a dog shelter.
It turns out that there is a serial killer stalking the neighbourhood. And that storyline intersects with the loner's one. That said, the police do not pay much attention to the string of brutal killings or to the girl's disappearance.
The story is very simple, the cast is very small, but somehow it seems to work. The main players deliver amazing performances, and the final scene - while somewhat predictable - is very well crafted.
A Great White Hunter named Frank Walsh (Nicholas Cage
Face/Off
) catches a rare jungle cat in South America,
and loads it on a ship to take it back to the USA.
A US government flunky (Michael Imperioli - Project Blue Book ) and a US Navy psychologist ( Famke Janssen ) have brought a prisoner, a renegade assassin (Kevin Durand - Lost ). Then, like in Con Air, they manage to let the mad-dog killer escape.
This movie might have been a lot more successful if had been made twenty years earlier, when Cage was fresh off The Rock (1995) and Janssen was well-known as a Bond girl from Goldeneye (1995) . As it is, they both seem past their best for an action movie.
Hotel manager Lisa (
Rachel McAdams
) takes a late-night flight home to Miami
with Senior Flight Attendant
Suzie Plakson
and teenage passenger Kyle Gallner (
Veronica Mars
). In the seat next to her is Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy -
Batman Begins
). He is charming at first,
but once the plane takes off he reveals himself
as the antagonist rather than a mere love interest.
Jackson's plan is to threaten Lisa's father (Brian Cox - Manhunter ) until Lisa phones Cynthia ( Jayma Mays ), the trainee Hotel clerk, and changes the room of a VIP. Jackson's mistake is that he reveals his final intention is to assassinate the VIP. Professionals like the Mossad would always disguise their intentions, using false flag identities to pass as a third party and then imply their intent was surveillance and potential blackmail. Instead of pretending to be FBI counter-intelligence, trying to catch the VIP as an agent of Red China, Jackson just says his true intentions.
The third act happens when the plane lands. Lisa makes an attempt to escape Jackson, which ends as a stalk-and-slash story. Meanwhile, the assassins do not use a sniper rifle like in the twentieth century. No, to give an explosive climax they have upgraded to an anti-tank missile!
Wes Craven delivers a taut action thriller that clocks in at about ninety minutes. It is fully self-contained, with every story beat both set up and paying off. Not a blockbuster movie, but a decent way to spend an hour and a half.
A man is trapped in a confined position by a sniper,
who cross-examines him at gunpoint and humiliates him with details of his extra-marital dalliance.
Yes, this is basically a rip-off of
Phone Booth
, the movie that made Colin Farrell a star.
However, that was a big-budget movie set in the glamorous location of New York City,
with a large cast of well-known stars.
This is set at night in a forest in rural Virgina,
and has a handful of complete unknowns.
There is no after-credits sequence. Instead, the end-credits has background animation that serves as the true end of the story. This is also the best part of the film, if only because you can watch it on fast-forward without missing anything.
No, not the movie made by
The Disaster Artist
. This may share the title, but it has a different story.
They are both adapted from books,
but this one is based on a novel apparently
inspired by the true-crime Fritzl case.
Joy ( Brie Larson ) and her son Jack (Jacob Tremblay - Dr Sleep ) live in a soundproofed shed with no windows, and only a skylight for natural illumination. To escape they must outwit their jailor, Old Nick, the man who abducted and enslaved Joy.
This is not a thriller, but rather a drama about the mother-child relationship. They get support from Joy's mother ( Joan Allen ), although her father (William H Macy - Mystery Men ) cannot cope with what happened to her.
This is also a commentary on the nature of society and its modern relationship with technology. Jack only experiences the outside world through a television set - and in the post-Covid world of 2023, this is quite relatable. Later, a street-level female cop ( Amanda Brughel ) orders the use of a spy satellite to track down Old Nick - like a senior Intelligence Agency Official in Enemy of the State . This is all a bit reminiscent of 1984 , with a television in every home and cameras everywhere for surveillance. In a sense, perhaps we are all as trapped as Joy and Jack were.
Five American tweenagers (including
Jenna Malone
and Shawn Ashmore -
X-Men: The Last Stand
) go exploring in the woods, fall foul of some murderous yokels.
They get besieged in the middle of nowhere,
where an evil presence is imprisoned.
The original aspects start from the fact that this is set in the Mexican jungle,
and the ruins and villagers are Mayan.
The film starts with suspense that is gradually notched up. The murderous, monsterous presence at the ruins is eventually shown on screen, presumably produced by CGI SPFX, but is original and convincing.
A housewife (
Noomi Rapace
) is kidnapped.
She is subject to tortures straight out of Room 101 in
1984
, psychological tortures based on her worst fears.
(Peter Stormare - Armageddon )
A group of tweenagers party on a beach.
The next morning, a few of them wake up.
They discover the hard way that something is lurking under the surface,
and if they step on the sand it will devour them.
It is nice to see a horror movie that does not feature the usual tropes, such as a masked slasher or a shadowy setting. Also, the cameo appearance of the Beach Patrol officer (Jamie Kennedy - Scream ) is a particular high point of the story.
An agoraphobic woman named Anna (
Beth Riesgraf
) lives in a big old house in the country.
When her brother dies, she is left alone.
And when his funeral is held,
her condition means she has to stay at home instead of attending.
Three white trash redneck types decide to rob the house during the funeral. Since they did not expect to find here there, things get complicated and the robbery goes badly wrong.
Anna manages to turn the tables on the intruders. It turns out that agoraphobia is not the only mental condition she has. The movie poster is reminiscent of Cabin in the Woods , but a better comparison would be The Collector .
The film hinges on the amazing performance of the female lead. Riesgraf, best known for a more light-hearted portrayal of a mentally unbalanced person in the TV show Leverage, is incredible.
A child psychologist, Mary (
Naomi Watts
), has to cope after her husband is killed.
She lives alone in a country house in Maine, USA ... yes, a
Cabin in the Woods
. Her only company is her tweenage step-son Stephen (Charlie Heaton -
), who has been crippled and left catatonic.
Luckily her shrink, Dr Wilson (Oliver Platt -
Three Musketeers
), video-chats with her regularly.
She gets a new patient, a young boy named Tom (Jacob Tremblay - ). He goes missing from his foster-home, and Mary keeps seeing him around her house.
By day, things are going well for Mary. She even gets a new potential love interest, Doug (David Cubitt - Siren ). However, by night she is troubled by strange nightmares. Is she being haunted by Tom's ghost?
The climax is pretty predictable, but not the worst bunch of cliches. Dr Wilson comes to the rescue, like Scarman Crothers in The Shining . He even steers one-handed while talking on his mobile phone and driving through a blizzard with minimal visibility. What could possibly go wrong?
Dave Nash (Sean Farris) and his wife Amy (
Briana Evigan
) move into their new house.
Unfortunately it turns out the place used to be a stash house for the Juarez cartel.
Worse, a local operator named Andy Spector (Dolph Lungren -
Universal Soldier
) drops by to collect something that was stashed there.
This does not bode well for any potential witnesses.
This is basically a low-budget remake of Panic Room . Evigan is bit less proactive than Foster was in her movie, which means this version takes a bit of a different turn. If we contrast the two, it certainly illustrates how a significantly larger budget can allow for better lighting, more setup for complicated camera shots, and more complicated storylines. The Foster movie had all of those things, while this consists largely of shadowy figures in darkened hallways.
Billy Zane (
Titanic
) gets shipwrecked.
Well, with his history he should have stayed clear of boats.
The good news is that he gets stuck on a desert island with Jennifer (
Kelly Brook
), so it becomes sort of a Blue Lagoon scenario.
Unfortunately another survivor arrives, so it becomes more of a
Dead Calm
scenario.
Archaeology Professor Hopper (Andrew Wilson -
Idiocracy (2006)
) goes into the woods in search of some hippies who went missing in the 1960s.
He discovers a new cave system, and goes exploring inside it.
A couple of days later, he has not returned. His tweenage Teaching Assistants, including Brianna Howey , go looking for him. They take along some kids they were babysitting.
It turns out that the cave has some supernatural qualities. The Professor, supposedly an expert in archaeology, does not seem to notice that anything is amiss. Rather than go for help, he goes back into the caves.
The protagonists eventually discover they are not alone. Much like The Descent (2005) , the place has its very own tribe of canniballistic humanoid underground dwellers. When a rescuer finally arrives, rather than ask for his help they run away towards the cave-people. They do this kind of thing several times, which makes them more than a little bit annoying and unsympathetic. To ignore help is bad enough, but to actively resist it is so much worse.
This starts with a prelude that sets the scene.
A gangster (Antonio Banderas -
Mask of Zorro
) is running a dog-fighting ring.
His new dog is a black pitbull terrier.
Adrien Brody ( Predators ), John Malkovich ( R.E.D. ) and Rory Culkin ( ) are a gang of armed robbers. As in every such movie before and after Reservoir Dogs , something has gone wrong and they need to hide out. When their getaway driver dies and crashes the car, they seek refuge in a nearby abandoned warehouse. By incredible coincidence, this turns out to be the same place the dog-fights are held in. Not only did the meanest dog outlive his usefulness, the man assigned to terminate him messed up the job. Now the robbers get hunted ...
The writer-director, Paul Solet , has included a series of crime thriller tropes. However, this movie is really about dogs. The three robbers all recount tales about their pets, although Malkovich's is about a fish.
The casting also seems to be a series of in-jokes. Brody was in Predators , a mis-named movie about trophy-hunting aliens, and the dog chasing him is a real predator. The running joke in Being John Malkovich was that the title character was in a diamond heist movie ... and now, finally, he plays a robber.
A pair of estranged sisters (
Taryn Manning, Francesca Eastwood
) are roped into a bank robbery.
Unfortunately things go wrong,
and the gang are trapped inside the building.
One of the hostages (James Franco -
The Disaster Artist (2017)
) cooperates, seemingly in order to end the siege peacefully.
But does he have an ulterior motive?
The bank's basement has a vault that supposedly contains a hidden fortune. Unfortunately the bank was once the site of a previous robbery, back in 1981, that went wrong and became a bloodbath. Now the site seems to have its own Ju-on curse like in The Grudge , and the basement is full of angry ghosts. Once the robbers trespass, they start getting picked off one at a time.
Since most of the characters are unsympathetic, the real suspense comes from asking - will the only likeable one, the chief bank-teller ( Q'orianka Kilcher ), make it out alive?
A pair of US Soldiers are on patrol in Iraq in 2007.
Unfortunately they run into a mysterious sniper
who is better at sniping than they are.
Shane the shooter (John Cena -
Peacemaker
) is hit, and Isaac the Eyes (Aaron Taylor-Johnson -
Tenet
) gets pinned down behind a wall.
Isaac is taunted by the Iraqi sniper.
This film used a real-life US Ranger sniper as consultant. He even has an on-screen cameo as one of the dead bodies.
Kevin Bacon (
X-Men: First Class
) is a successful middle-class American
who is terrorised by nightmares.
This probably indicates a deep-seated insecurity about his wife (
Amanda Seyfried
), who is over twenty years younger than him.
Worse, she is a beautiful actress who does a lot of enthusiastic sex scenes.
Naturally, this leaves him in deep uncertainty.
She gets a job in London, so they rent a house nearby. Well, it is in a remote part of Wales - hundreds of miles from London, so not exactly an easy commute.
The house is isolated and rural, but it is not a cabin in the woods . Instead it is a new-built house, bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Time seems to travel at different speeds. For example, the local village has a convenience store that pre-dates the self-service system which has been commonplace since the 1960s.
In the climax, we discover that the house is evil. Or whatever. We have seen it all before.
The bad news is, this was written and directed by one man. On the good side, it is based on a novel - but that is not enough to save it.
