The Box
I was very excited to see this movie. I’m a huge Richard Kelly fan. Donnie Darko is a masterpiece, and Kelly really fell from grace with the crazy ‘Southland Tales’, so there’s a lot riding on The Box. It’s based on a Richard Matheson (he wrote I Am Legend) short story called ‘Button, Button’ and stars Cameron Diaz, James Marsden and Frank Langella (Richard Nixon actor).
The premise is simple to begin with. A young couple are given a box with a button. The deal is, if they push the button, someone they don’t know will die, and they will be given a million dollars. They push the button, and then must deal with a series of unusual circumstances.
My feelings were that this movie is slightly flawed. It reminds me of a Kubrick movie – something chilling, and very off beat. The story is very engaging and well told, yet it just loses it’s way near the end. This is an awful pity. Kelly falls into the trap that many directors before him (looking at you Shyamalan) have also done. He doesn’t know how he wants to end his movie and resorts to ridiculous conclusions. The movie is essentially about the human condition and is very apt in it’s commentary on greed, selfishness and desperation, yet its Twilight Zone conclusion will frustrate many. Not quite the return to form that we’d all hoped for.
6/10
The Descent: Part 2
Anyone that knows their horror movies will agree that The Descent is one of the great horror movies of the 00’s. It took a fairly simple idea and executed it as a chilling horror movie flawlessly, using people’s fears of the dark, and enclosed spaces as it’s main weapon.
But many will have joined me in feeling that a second Descent movie was highly unnecessary. I went to see this with very low expectations and left feeling that I hadn’t been completely robbed of my money.
Part 2 is highly watchable. It doesn’t hold back in terms of gore and hasn’t lost any of the claustrophobic charm of the original. Many of the original cast feature and are still highly effective. I don’t want to say too much here as it may spoil it for you.
Sure, it’s pretty much the same story. Sarah returns to the caves with local law enforcement to help them find her friends. She has no memory of the what happened before, and they all get stuck in the caves. Sarah’s memory comes slowly back and chaos ensues as the cave dwellers look for food.
Some of the dialogue is cheesy and the support actors are merely filler until they are eaten alive by the blind fellas that live in the caves, but overall I found myself leaving the cinema quite surprised that I had watched it straight trough and more or less enjoyed it.
To summarise, watchable but unnecessary DVD fodder.
5/10
