In an effort to try to find better movies, I have been looking through Netflix and sorting things by their ratings. When it comes to horror movies, I really will consider a movie “good” if it has a rating of three stars. And guess what, most of them aren’t even good enough for three stars. This movie was in my queue somehow and I bumped it up closer to the top. Granted, I didn’t do this based on the star rating alone, but I mean come on, look at that cover art! A frail blonde woman not wearing much clothing and covered with blood and sadness? As well as being supported by Fangoria? How could I go wrong?!

This chick isn’t in her underwear, but she’s in her pajamas, so it’s close. Also, yes, I do wear Uggs as part of my pajamas.

A little boy wakes up in a car that has most likely careened off of a cliff, and he looks at his mom, who is dead. The movie then goes dark and we start hearing the sounds of terrified yelling. It sounds as though there are three or four characters all clamoring in the dark, trying to figure out what’s going on, while the scene slowly gets lighter and lighter over the course of a few minutes, until you can almost see these people’s faces. A bright light then comes on, and we realize there are five people in a cave, no one knowing one another or why they are there. After getting cranky and being confused for a whole day as to what the fuck is going on, they notice a clock the next day. Rather than counting minutes or hours, we learn that this clock is counting days. After exploring this small cave they appear to be in, they find a door that has large drums of water, as well as a scalpel with a note saying the human body can go thirty days without food. Combine that with the knowledge of the clock in the other room, they realize someone has trapped them there in hopes of seeing what these strangers do. The result? After about three weeks, two characters gang up on and kill another, and a third character joins them. Only one partakes in the not eating, and does so for a few more days while the other three kill each other off. Eventually it’s just one lady, the one from the cover, who kills everyone else and then writes a message out of blood, out of sight from the cameras that the organizer of this experiment used to monitor the situation. Curiosity gets the better of him, and when he goes down to investigate, she’s waiting for him, and stabs him, and escapes. Yay for murder!

Completely unrelated to this picture, the longer I spent looking for pictures from the movie Hunger, the less I would pronounce it “Hun-Ger” and more I would pronounce it “Hung-Er”. Just for the record.

Have you seen that movie Cube? What about that movie Saw? Well, combine those two, put it in a cave, give it a fraction of the budget, and you get this movie. While trying to figure out why they are all in there together, we learn that all of the characters, with the exception of one, have been involved in the death of another person. How does that affect their actions? We’re not too sure, because the person running the experiment explains nothing. I suppose some people might consider that a good thing, and although I didn’t think it was necessarily a bad thing, I would have liked a little more backstory. We also learn by the end of the movie that the boy in the car accident in the beginning ended up taking a bite out of his mom and grows up to be the guy running this experiment. I did like the novelty of the opening scene where they were trying to recreate what it’s like to be surrounded by darkness and to have your eyes slowly adjust and have things get lighter and lighter as you got used to it. Had this movie come out before either Saw or Cube I might have enjoyed it a little bit more, but it seemed to borrow a little too heavily from both of those films for me to have enjoyed it more than I did. Oh, and the outfit the blonde lady wears on the poster? Doesn’t wear it in the movie. Sorry guys!

Wolfman Moon Scale