Death Tunnel [DVD] [2006]

Death Tunnel is a story that begins in familiar horror territory: a college students' initiation ceremony in which they have to spend the night in a haunted house, in this case an asylum, with their preceptors monitoring them through CCTV and radio. However here the plot turns into something more refreshing, particularly with its haunting references to the White Plague, and the (often very eerie) ghosts of those who had suffered.

There are a lot of shades of "The House On Haunted Hill" and such movies here, not just an asylum with its own memories, but in the gritty filming. Unfortunately some of that was lost slightly with the filming panning outdoors occasionally, as one loses the sympathetic 'claustrophobia' effect building up with the protagonists.

There were a few other things that niggled me a little, such as the time frame sequences. Chopping up a film and flashing backwards and forwards so that you gradually get the history and background of the story at the same time as you're watching the present, is not an unusual format nowadays. But the sheer speed in which it was done occasionally became a little confusing. The characters were not all that clearly defined either; in fact their "Plague-era" alter-egos were much better acted and more clearly defined than the pretty-samey college kids that had started out.

Nevertheless, it's a good watch and although there are some ideas clearly lifted from other familiar places, it's a notch or two above a lot of its contemporaries, and worth having a look at.

Five girls. Five floors. Five hours. And believe you me, it will feel like every second of five hours before you finally reach the light at the end of the tunnel that is The End. Now I knew going in that most people hated this movie, but I still wanted to see it, dadgummit. After all, five sexy coeds in a haunted sanitorium can't be all that bad, can it? The answer is a resounding Yes - it can and is that bad. This isn't the kind of bad movie that totally amateur filmmakers might go out and shoot over the course of a weekend, either. It takes a lot of hard work and effort to make a horror movie this wretchedly awful. Apparently, it helps when the producer and director dress like Axl Rose. The direction is terrible, jumping back and forth between the actual initiation and the leadup to it for at least the first half of the film and leaving a number of logistical questions completely unanswered. Still, the brunt of the blame must fall upon the writers of this incoherent mess, for they truly deserve to be run out of town by a mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers.

Kentucky's Waverly Hills Sanatorium serves as an ideal setting for the horrors that were supposed to be unleashed here (in fact, the most interesting thing on the whole DVD is the descriptions by cast and crew of some of the spooky things they really experienced there), but Death Tunnel does no favors to the very real history of this medical institution. The filmmakers reportedly used some actual EVP recordings in the movie, but, unfortunately, there is no explanation as to how these were obtained.

At least the five girls aren't bad looking at all, especially lead actress Steffany Huckaby. Don't look for too much in the way of nudity, however, as the filmmaking Booth Brothers obviously don't subscribe to the old "the worse the movie is, the more nudity you show" tradition (if they did, they would have had no need for a costumer at all). Not a single character is given an ounce of substance, so you could care less if and how any of them might die. What you have here are just five college girls chosen for a special initiation at a Truth or Scare party. One girl is deposited on each of the five floors (except they put two of them together for no apparent reason), and they have five hours to get out of the place by way of the infamous Death Tunnel. They know all this, and there are pictures and newspaper clippings everywhere identifying the place as an old sanitorium, yet it takes Heather, supposedly the smart one, almost seventy-five minutes to figure it out (which takes something away from what is supposed to be a climactic scene). And the ending? Don't even get me started on the ending.

A lot of work went into the special effects, but it's just a list of all your usual suspects - blurred images, shaking cameras, and computer-generated ghosts up the wazoo. In other words, it's nothing we haven't seen before, especially in the past few years. Personally, I found Death Tunnel about as scary as cutting my toenails. I could be nice and say the filmmakers probably just tried too hard to make this movie scary, but there's no getting beyond the fact that this is one rotten egg stinker of a horror movie.

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