Can you tell I'm dialing it in this week? I'm still getting over a cold/flu thing (pretty sure it wasn't Covid) and so I haven't dedicated too much time to writing blog posts. Escape the Undertaker is an interactive movie on Netflix, think Black Mirror: Bandersnatch but with less choices. At just half an hour long there isn't time for this to get too boring, though some of the ways the choices are implemented were not the best.
Wrestlers Big E, Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods have arrived at the remote mansion home of The Undertaker in order to take his magical urn. The trio make up the wrestling team New Day, and it is hoped the power of the urn will allow them to become even more positive people, helping their wrestling career. Despite the unwelcome intrusion, Undertaker, watching from a bank of monitors deep within his mansion allows them into his place, seeing this as a chance to steal their souls.
So this is very lighthearted with New Day being a goofy bunch of guys who seem the very definition of nice. The choices the viewer is presented with here send things down rational pathways, such as choosing which wrestler to follow, which results in one of three different scenes playing out. There are a few different endings based on what you decide to do, but seems to be one proper one, the others featuring bad endings. I didn't like how this culminated in that first time around I wasn't even aware I was at the end, making for confusion when I thought I was choosing a choice and instead found myself sent back five or so minutes into the film. Special effects are of the cheesy variety, magical lightning and other effects are quite low quality. The film can never become true horror as it is geared towards children, so Undertaker is over the top but hardly fear inducing. One thing this did get right was the set dressing, a highlight being a picture of Paul Bearer on the wall in one room. The house is full of traps and secrets which looked fun.
Escape the Undertaker was perfectly fine, but it was lacking on quite a few fronts. While it was fun to see wrestlers outside of wrestling I did find the three protagonists to be a bit annoying, perhaps as I don't know who they are, having never watched modern wrestling. Still, for what it is this was decent enough, hardly essential viewing but there are worse ways to spend a half hour.
SCORE:
No comments:
Post a Comment