Legendary Pictures,
Perdita Weeks, Ben Feldman, Edwin Hodge, François Civil,
Scarlet (Perdita Weeks) is following in her father’s footsteps searching out relics of ancient human history. In the middle east she finds a key piece of information to lead her to a precious stone in the catacombs under the streets of Paris. She meets up with her friend George (Ben Feldman) and connives to bring him along with some local guys she finds who know they way into the catacombs. Papillon (François Civil) is the leader of a group who have been down in the catacombs many times before. But things get very complicated as an ancient evil is present in this undiscovered are of the ruins that is the gateway between earth and hell.
This was a scary movie. But I do have to admit that the times I jumped were from the soundtrack and the sound system, not from the suspense of this kind of silly horror fest. Granted it has lots of scary scenes….in a world full of bones, but as they go through the same corridors time and time again, it starts to look really familiar. Truthfully, it was kind of fun to get the adrenaline rush of loud sounds making you jump, and people pay huge prices to walk through the haunted mazes this time of year for that, and this is full of that kind of jump in your face scares. But the story is pretty weak and falls into silliness time and time again. After an hour and a half of struggling through the maze of this underground horror tunnel we are hit with a sudden and quite unfulfilled ending that makes us wonder what just happened. The cast is likeable enough, but they don’t have enough experience to pull this off, and it shows. Additionally, there’s not much of a budget going, and this is another example of a film that was released to theaters prior to being shown to the critics which is always a bad sign. I expect the audience here is the teen set who like the easy jumps and screams and doesn’t mind the lack of substance to the story. They took on a really deep and difficult subject and blew it off with trivial explanations of what is going on. It’s just not that great of a film to deserve your big bucks at the theater, and I was really happy I took this in at the matinee to save myself a few bills. I can’t highly recommend this except for the exact audience for which this is intended. Otherwise, wait for it on video.
EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog
