Kip Pardue and his buddies (Scott Adkins and Karl Geary) get ejected from the club he was having his bachelor party at, because of Pardue’s screw-up brother Breckin Meyer. No worries, Adkins knows of another club, and so they hop on a train, even running into two girls (one of whom is Vinessa Shaw, while the other one is not) who worked ( strippers ) at the club they were just kicked out of. But then Meyer starts acting up again, and in an ensuing fracas, they all find themselves off the train and at the wrong stop. Now they’re stranded in the middle of a dimly lit tunnel, ready to be picked off by the murderous underground denizens who seem to rule the tunnels. Oh you didn’t know about them? Well they’re here, and they’re not exactly looking for some loose change.
I don’t like constantly trashing modern horror films, but the fact is, I haven’t seen too many good ones in recent times. Sadly this Peter A. Dowling (the writer of “Flightplan”, in his directorial debut) film is not that bright shining light I’m looking for. It’s the same old story, I’m afraid (Dowling also scripted, in case you were wondering). The premise isn’t bad, but the characters aren’t developed and the film ends up just a whole lot of people talking and shouting for 90 minutes in the dark. Finally I get a film with characters older than 25 and they’re just as objectionable, obnoxious, infantile, and uninteresting as a bunch of younger characters would be. Damn it. Gee, let’s have sex in an underground subway at 5am with a virtual stranger- what a genius idea, and totally sanitary too. Are there really people out there who would do such a thing? Really? Even watching these people die isn’t any fun because I failed to care about them or their plight. The film is a total waste of the talents of the impressive martial artist Adkins, in a non-action role. The man really ought to stick to the action genre, where I believe he should’ve been a big star by now. He has the look, the fighting skills, and his acting isn’t the worst I’ve seen in the action genre.
I have to say that the view of homeless people here is admittedly pretty objectionable too. It’s pretty foul and insensitive in the pursuit of cheap genre entertainment, and the film doesn’t earn the right to do what it’s doing by virtue of being pretty damn mediocre.
The film has positives, and I might surprise you with my next thought. Here’s a film that uses shaky cam and dark cinematography…to an advantageous effect! Obscuring the menacing goings on actually works in keeping the audience in suspense, we need to be kept in the dark (although it makes the action hard to follow at times). It also makes sense that the lighting be dark given the location the film is set in. Dark and blue-filtered as it is, I like the film’s rather hellish look. It even manages to make a passing train seem quite unnerving, and if it were too brightly lit, it wouldn’t work in the slightest. As is, the film manages to be effectively creepy at times, and although sometimes underlit, I liked how we got several different sources of light throughout. Thankfully the film is mostly free of the snot-coloured “Saw” lighting most modern horror films feature (despite a setting that might reasonably call for such a thing).
There’s a great bit as a guy is slashed by what appears to be two blades, and we get blood gushing out from two different areas, albeit briefly. There’s also a decent beheading but it would’ve been better if better lit. The ending is interestingly bleak, but a bit botched if you ask me.
OVERALL SUMMARY
An interesting premise, a creepy vibe and interesting look cannot sustain a film with no one to care about.
