I saw the Death House Twitter account begging for people to give positive reviews for the movie, as according to them, the 'Trolls' have had a go at it. So i will give this an honest constructive. It is true amateur reviewers will often either give a movie an extreme rating, either 1 or a 10 . Neither of which is particularly helpful .
So i'll go through the positives and negatives of what i can contribute to the conversation .
What worked?
- It is fun to spot all the plethora of horror and B-movie actors , some of which only have a brief walk on performance.
- There is one truly stand out scene , where there is a bunch of skinless zombie like creatures, that does look really impressive effects wise.
- Kane Hodder is pretty good in this
What didn't work
- Too concerned with setting up a sequel with Tony Todd's character
- The cinematography is very poor. It's far too dark and under lit, making it impossible to see what is going on sometimes. I appreciate it's taking place in an underground prison, but you have to write your script and film it so people can see what is going on. Besides, no one is watching this for realism.
- With the exception of the scene mentioned above. The effects are very poor. Horrible green scree, poor cgi after effects and even other practical effects look bad
- The acting isn't good , our two lead protagonists are wooden, and even veteran actors like Dee Wallace turn in a poor performance. It seem like the director has done one take, and just accepted it.
- The biggest issue is the story and script . It is all over the place , it simply doesn't make a lick of sense from beginning to end . Right from the start where it's never fully explained who and why our two lead characters are and what they are doing there at the beginning of the movie, right up until the end with the quite frankly embarrassing 'Five evils ' scene. The narrative structure is so poor, confusing and convoluted
Ultimately this movie should have invested it's finances behind the camera rather than being so concerned with all the cameos , which ends up being really a waste of the actors time .
A real waste of an opportunity and concept . Although i don't like this typical internet behavior of it's either a 1 or a 10 . I think it's equally deplorable for a film company to essentially coerce the weak minded to giving overly favorable reviews.
