Available to pre-order from Amazon THE FILM I gotta tell you, I have had more than enough of the "omniscient psycho killer/game player" horror genre. The ten thousand films that have come out in the wake of the huge success of
SAW have almost all flopped badly, mainly due to a lack of originality and a desperate lack of suspense. The latest attempt at the genre is
STEEL TRAP, a slapdash, low-budget horror thriller which distinguishes itself by lacking both.
The film, directed by first time helmer
LUIS CAMARA, tells the story of a group of people collected together by an unseen host inside an abandoned high-rise. Each level contains mysterious, nursery-rhyme clues which directs them to elaborate traps. They are stalked in the darkness by a silent killer dressed in black, and he picks them off one by one. This would-be horror film is not very scary, thanks to a heavy-handed script that telegraphs each killing in obvious fashion. Adding to the non-tension is an amazingly abrasive cast of characters, each one more unlikeable than the next. We begin to root for the villain to dispose of them. Unfortunately, the promise of blood and gore effects - this is, after all, a DIMENSION EXTREME release - is unfounded, with the limited makeup effects shown only in blurry, quickly-cut close ups. As mentioned earlier, this film falls into the recent wave of films that feature an omni-present, all-knowing villain. The black-clad killer manages to be everywhere at once, anticipating as far back as two years in advance to plan the deaths of his victims. He manages to be on different floors of the building whenever the script requires him to be there, regardless of whether his actions follow simple logic. For instance, there is a sequence in which some of our "heroes" travel down the elevator, having narrowly escaped the killer. When the doors open, the killer is waiting for them with a gun, and begins shooting at them. At other times throughout the movie, the victims change their course to purposely throw off their captor, yet he manages to anticipate even their spontaneous thoughts and set up booby traps for them. After a while, these elaborate traps become more amusing than terrifying. The cast, full of C-list actors, is uniformly bad here. The worst performance comes from
JULIA BALLARD, who plays her role like a hysterical, out of control animatronic. Only
GEORGIA MACKENZIE manages to elicit any kind of depth or charisma in her performance as the host of a television cooking show. I have no idea why so many horror films fail at the simple premise of scaring an audience. One of the reasons why this one fails is because it is not inspired to be anything other than a
SAW knockoff. The best horror films are not derivative; rather, they reach into our deepest remembered fears and place us in them. The boldest horror films tell us who we are, and where we are most afraid of going. Unfortunately,
STEEL TRAP has nothing on its mind other than repeating the same old cliches we have seen a million times previously. A wasted opportunity.
EXTRAS Besides an audio commentary with director Camara, we also have an extensive making-of documentary, which chronicles nearly every single second of production. I mean, we even get extensive footage of the wrap party in this documentary, which may be as long as the movie itself. Unfortunately, this doc reveals the low-budget, unplanned nature of this film. While I am sure a lot of passion went into its making, the final product demonstrates that these people need to spend more time actually planning out their next film.
OVERALL Not very bloody, and not very horrific. Terrible performances. A tired and cliched plot. Do you really think you need to sit through this when I, your beloved critic, had the displeasure of doing it for you? Hell, that's the scariest part of the movie.