Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021) - Horror Film Review

Escape Room (as always, not to be confused with Escape Room) was a neat horror film that may have been very silly, but it was also very enjoyable, and featured some superb set design. It takes me back to the heady pre-pandemic days of going to the cinema, and due to that pandemic I missed out on seeing the sequel, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, when it hit the cinemas. Well, it's now came to Netflix and currently sits at the No.1 position in the UK top ten at time of writing. I had heard it was a poor sequel, but had to check it out anyway. I'm glad I did as while this is again really silly, it was again really enjoyable, so much so that I was surprised when it ended at just how quickly it seemed to flow by. Spoilers for the first film to follow.

Having survived a twisted escape room experience in which rich people placed bets on who would survive the deadly rooms, Zoey (Taylor Russell - Escape Room) and Ben (Logan Miller - Escape Room) decide they must expose the evil company responsible. They head to New York where they think they have located the HQ of the Minos company, but instead find a derelict building. A series of events leads to the two ending up on a subway train, along with four other passengers, and before they can do anything about it, they discover the train is actually the start of a new escape room. Quickly discovering the other passengers are also survivors of Minos escape rooms, they see the only option to try and work together and once again 'win' the game, but like before, each room they come across is more deadly than the last.

Apparently the home release of the movie had an extended cut which drastically altered parts of the film. I have only seen the theatrical cut and so obviously my review will be based on that. I felt some trepidation coming into this as I was not sure how the two protagonists would manage to fall into another experience. It sub(way)verted my expectations as there were a few false moments before the story begins proper, including a fun nightmare sequence, and various moments that had be questioning what was really going on. The story is silly of course, and one of my very early predictions ended up being true, but there were also some genuinely surprising moments. What I really liked about this sequel is that it goes to some lengths to recap what happened previously, so much so that I didn't really need to have read the Wikipedia synopsis, as the events of that first film are shown in a relatively lengthy prologue

The six main characters were interesting enough, including a priest (Thomas Cocquerel), a former travel vlogger (Indya Moore), and a woman with a condition that means she is unable to feel pain (Holland Roden - Teen Wolf TV series) among the characters. I liked that these were all likeable people, and it was nice how they began to work together as a team almost immediately. Their different accounts of the various escape rooms they had escaped from were entertaining.
The main hook is of course the escape rooms themselves, and I'm pleased to say they were just as impressively designed as before. Over the five or so rooms they encounter all sorts of new dangers, from acid rain, to electricity, quicksand, floods and lasers, all in wonderfully designed rooms. These include some like the first movie that appear initially to be outdoors, before it's revealed to be a trick. I would say one minor complaint is how obscure the puzzles often felt, with me often losing track of just how the characters were figuring things out. There is lots of Crystal Maze style situations of characters shouting hurriedly at each other about what they need to do. Maybe I was misremembering, but the death scenes this time around felt a bit tame, with  more than few characters death scenes happening away from the focus of the camera. The plot was dumb but fun, and leads to a predictably bonkers ending that I hope results in a third film.

Having heard Escape Room: Tournament of Champions was a shadow of the first film, I was most happy to discover I enjoyed this one just as much. The set dressing was fantastic here, with the film having such a cool design to it. It is testament to how much I was loving this that I was genuinely surprised when I found out the movie was near its end, the ninety minutes was over in a flash. Escape Room: Tournament of Champions can currently be streamed on Netflix.

SCORE:

A Guidebook to Killing Your Ex (2016) - Horror Film Review

A Guidebook to Killing Your Ex is Hungarian director Jozsef Gallai's fourth found footage horror and so you would imagine he has quite the handle on the bloated genre now. Of his previous films I saw Bodom (2014) that felt like quite an old school found footage horror. Then I watched last year's Moth that was again quite traditional, though that time in a cheeky way. His latest movie joins the current vogue for crazies purposely filming the footage.

Balazs Szitas stars as the unnamed creator of the footage being shot throughout the film. He soon announces that it is his intention to kill his ex girlfriend and her fiancee and that he is making a video to serve as a guide for anyone else looking to kill their ex. The footage takes place in the 72 hours leading up to the enactment of his plan...

Don't Breathe (2016) - Horror Film Review

I had heard good things about Don't Breathe (directed and co-written by Fede Alvarez) and so I was excited to see it. I knew the general gist of the movie as a podcast I listen to had talked of it but for once previously at the cinema I hadn't seen a trailer for it.

Set in Detroit and three amateur burglars; Rocky (Jane Levy), Alex (Dylan Minnette), and Money (Daniel Zovatto) have decided to rob the house of a war veteran (Stephen Lang) as they suspect he is keeping thousands of dollars there. Despite discovering that he is blind they go ahead with the break in. Things don't go according to plan though as they discover the blind man is very far from helpless and soon they must fight with their lives to escape his tomb of a house.

Bodom (2014) - Horror Film Review

Bodom is Hungary's first ever feature length found footage film and also the first Hungarian film I have ever reviewed. Here at The Rotting Zombie HQ found footage don't always get a warm welcome as it seems a genre bereft of any new ideas.

In 1960 at Lake Bodom in Finland four youngsters camping there were attacked in the middle of the night with only one survivor, the attacker was never caught. That much I believe actually happened in real life. In 2009 two students; Annikki and Pietari head to the lake to do a thesis about the strange murders, but their trip ends with horrific consequences.

Bodom is set out like a documentary rather than just a collection of pieced together camera work. This actually made a decent change to the usual formula. Picture The Blair Witch Project but with later interviews with the friends and family of the missing people intercut. This works in not only splitting up the shaky cam footage that can often get tiring but also works in that there is a legitimate reason for the footage to be around. There is nothing worse than a found footage film where the found footage of the piece makes no sense for existing neatly edited together. Also appreciated was the ending in which the documentary attempts to explain the events and reveals some decent information. Characters in the interviews display foreshadowing of events to come that really help create a sense of mystery.

Now it is hard to judge the acting ability as it is not in English but to me it seemed to be good, it certainly never seemed like these were fake characters. The subtitles for the most part are decent, a few slight errors (such as the decision to subtitle sound effects at some points). The majority of the film has just the two characters of Annikki and her acquaintance Pietari who really do not seem to like each other even before anything sinister happens. Any conversation they have seems to dissolve into arguments and your left wondering why they even decided to go out to remote Lake Bodom together, especially when it appears that there may be a reason from their past why they really should not be together. These arguments make them seem more real.

At sixty five minutes in length Bodom does not have time to get boring or stale. The usual format for these things takes place with around the first forty five minutes nothing sinister really happening at all. There is a slow build to the terror which suddenly occurs. The plot and reasoning behind what happens is drip fed and is never fully explained and on some levels makes no sense but I felt leaving questions behind made for a more atmospheric story regardless. For once it seems that the reason for the madness may not be supernatural in origin that I felt was a good decision. This is certainly from the 'people lost in woods' side of found footage and not the 'demonic possession in rich peoples' house' type. The flip side to this build up is that there isn't really enough time for the pure horror part of the film to shine in full and some plot elements seem a bit tacked on.

I liked the documentary format of the film, I liked the overall plot and the playing with audience expectations. Bodom looks crisp when it needs to, looks rough when it needs to be (I love how an explanation for abrupt camera cuts is given), and the fact that the Bodom murder from 1960 the students are researching actually happened in real life was a nice touch. This film is not going to keep you up at night with fear, nor can it be said to be completely original (lots of shaky cam and night vision for instance) but it is competent and enjoyable regardless and so is worth a watch.

SCORE: