This movie falls under my emerging favorite microgenre of "X number of people locked together in a room who have to escape/kill each other/figure something out/some combination therein." There have been very good movies in this microgenre (Cube, Exam, the original Saw), good movies in it (Cube 2), fair/decent movies in it (Nine Dead), and terrible movies in it (House of Nine). I'm not sure any have been truly great, but this microgenre is more of a guilty pleasure than anything. And there are more movies in it that I've not yet seen (Fermat's Room, Unknown).
This movie has a somewhat ambitious group of gameplayers, numbering 14. We start off over the shoulder of the 14th player, the drop-dead sexy blonde on the poster (yeah, that didn't really hurt as a reason why I wanted to watch this, either :) ) They're wearing metal collars, and are housed in a stripped-down warehouse with placards attached to the walls that give them "rules" that they're meant to follow, like "players must keep their hands clean" and "players may not adjust their collars." Stashed throughout the warehouse are "hints" such as "player 5 is not telling the truth" or "player 14 is the key" or cryptic ones like "piece the pieces together" or, most tellingly, "there is a serial killer, rapist, and pedophile in this room." Eventually, a host comes on a video screen and tells them that the game has begun, and one player will win the best prize of all - life. This already is nothing we haven't heard before many a time. At irregular intervals, the lights go out and someone is killed. Others are killed for breaking rules.
Then, when there's only three or four left, a new person, player zero, is added. Already I'm wondering what the point of this is. They succeed in getting his collar off, which means he's allowed to break the rules. They put together that a box of bullets, a bottle of alcohol, and a cigarette lighter are meant to blow up an obstruction at the end of a hallway behind the door. OK, now we might be getting somewhere. Except oops, we're not. Time for player zero to die. Sure hope he enjoyed his ten minutes in the film.
The big twist at the end is that the sexy blonde is the killer. While fairly predictable, it's not the worst decision they could have made with the story. Unfortunately, they followed it up with the worst decision they could have made with the story.
The movie essentially doesn't have an ending. After everyone else is dead, Blondie casually removes her collar and goes into some kind of back room, where a dude behind a computer terminal sits working. He asks if they got what they needed, and she says they always do. Then she goes to her own terminal, looking over the files of the people she'd just murdered (I...guess?) and suits up to do it all again.
So...it's a group of scientists who.....murder people? That's the closest we come to any kind of an explanation of what's going on. The movie builds toward "Ok, they're gonna figure it all out, they're gonna escape, they're gonna find out what this was all for," but...no. Not even close. Not even a whiff of it, like the ending to Cube. And of course, there's some false-protagonist goofs (Blondie listens to an audio tape while alone in the bathroom that does not speak to her as the killer, but as a "player." Why, if she's in on it, would she need to listen to that tape while she's alone in the bathroom? Only to fool the viewer, which is LAZY). Piece the pieces together? There was NOTHING to piece together! There was no game at all - the 13 "players" were automatically dead the whole time.
But worse yet, it's just a very cheaply made movie. The Foley for the lights-out attacks is just laughably bad. If you've ever been around someone who's lost their balance and taken a tumble, you know what it sounds like when a body hits the ground. Apparently, that's not the case with whoever did the Foley for this movie. It was just cartoonish and cheesy. It was sort of confusing during the murdering that the characters seemed to react like they were in pitch blackness, but a very clear red emergency light was on. Was that just for the viewers? Again, lazy.
The acting, believe it or not, is by and large okay. It gets the movie its second star. I thought about bumping it up to three, but those babbling old women take it down a notch. Really, they're horrible. I wanted to personally stick a knife through the eye of...number three, I think (the one who screams and stutters after the host first appears on the screen). But everyone else does okay. Number five, the rapist, exudes EXTREME creepiness when he's just talking about his favorite kind of candy, so you can imagine how skin-crawlingly disgusting it is when he goes in for...well, trying to go in. The sexy blonde, the dashing male lead, the guy with the gun, (he reminded me a lot of Gael Garcia Bernal's character in "Blindness," which was quite possibly the only good thing about THAT movie, but that's a story for another time) all solidly performed, along with the supporting roles who didn't stay as long. But while a solid/good screenplay can lift so-so acting (I refer again back to Cube), the reverse doesn't really happen.
To put it simply, this movie sucked. Recommend steering clear.
This movie has a somewhat ambitious group of gameplayers, numbering 14. We start off over the shoulder of the 14th player, the drop-dead sexy blonde on the poster (yeah, that didn't really hurt as a reason why I wanted to watch this, either :) ) They're wearing metal collars, and are housed in a stripped-down warehouse with placards attached to the walls that give them "rules" that they're meant to follow, like "players must keep their hands clean" and "players may not adjust their collars." Stashed throughout the warehouse are "hints" such as "player 5 is not telling the truth" or "player 14 is the key" or cryptic ones like "piece the pieces together" or, most tellingly, "there is a serial killer, rapist, and pedophile in this room." Eventually, a host comes on a video screen and tells them that the game has begun, and one player will win the best prize of all - life. This already is nothing we haven't heard before many a time. At irregular intervals, the lights go out and someone is killed. Others are killed for breaking rules.
Then, when there's only three or four left, a new person, player zero, is added. Already I'm wondering what the point of this is. They succeed in getting his collar off, which means he's allowed to break the rules. They put together that a box of bullets, a bottle of alcohol, and a cigarette lighter are meant to blow up an obstruction at the end of a hallway behind the door. OK, now we might be getting somewhere. Except oops, we're not. Time for player zero to die. Sure hope he enjoyed his ten minutes in the film.
The big twist at the end is that the sexy blonde is the killer. While fairly predictable, it's not the worst decision they could have made with the story. Unfortunately, they followed it up with the worst decision they could have made with the story.
The movie essentially doesn't have an ending. After everyone else is dead, Blondie casually removes her collar and goes into some kind of back room, where a dude behind a computer terminal sits working. He asks if they got what they needed, and she says they always do. Then she goes to her own terminal, looking over the files of the people she'd just murdered (I...guess?) and suits up to do it all again.
So...it's a group of scientists who.....murder people? That's the closest we come to any kind of an explanation of what's going on. The movie builds toward "Ok, they're gonna figure it all out, they're gonna escape, they're gonna find out what this was all for," but...no. Not even close. Not even a whiff of it, like the ending to Cube. And of course, there's some false-protagonist goofs (Blondie listens to an audio tape while alone in the bathroom that does not speak to her as the killer, but as a "player." Why, if she's in on it, would she need to listen to that tape while she's alone in the bathroom? Only to fool the viewer, which is LAZY). Piece the pieces together? There was NOTHING to piece together! There was no game at all - the 13 "players" were automatically dead the whole time.
But worse yet, it's just a very cheaply made movie. The Foley for the lights-out attacks is just laughably bad. If you've ever been around someone who's lost their balance and taken a tumble, you know what it sounds like when a body hits the ground. Apparently, that's not the case with whoever did the Foley for this movie. It was just cartoonish and cheesy. It was sort of confusing during the murdering that the characters seemed to react like they were in pitch blackness, but a very clear red emergency light was on. Was that just for the viewers? Again, lazy.
The acting, believe it or not, is by and large okay. It gets the movie its second star. I thought about bumping it up to three, but those babbling old women take it down a notch. Really, they're horrible. I wanted to personally stick a knife through the eye of...number three, I think (the one who screams and stutters after the host first appears on the screen). But everyone else does okay. Number five, the rapist, exudes EXTREME creepiness when he's just talking about his favorite kind of candy, so you can imagine how skin-crawlingly disgusting it is when he goes in for...well, trying to go in. The sexy blonde, the dashing male lead, the guy with the gun, (he reminded me a lot of Gael Garcia Bernal's character in "Blindness," which was quite possibly the only good thing about THAT movie, but that's a story for another time) all solidly performed, along with the supporting roles who didn't stay as long. But while a solid/good screenplay can lift so-so acting (I refer again back to Cube), the reverse doesn't really happen.
To put it simply, this movie sucked. Recommend steering clear.