Blackout

I'm partial to movies that manage to hold my interest even with a limited number of characters and a limited number of locations. Most of this movie takes place inside a cramped elevator, and this could easily turn into a very boring viewing experience if the actors in the movie can't carry the action on their own. The premise of the movie is also simple enough that it's easily screwed up if everything doesn't work together correctly: three people are trapped in an elevator in an old building over the fourth of July holiday. Because of the holiday they have little hope for rescue. Further complicating things is the fact that over the course of the hours they are trapped inside the elevator, tensions flare and they are stretched to the breaking point. Little do they know until its too late that everything is even worse than it seems: one of them is a serial killer and the other two might not make it through the ordeal alive.

The movie opens and we are introduced to the characters and things are a little shaky. Amber Tamblyn is a good actress, so I wasn't worried about her, and she's good here as a young woman who is going through a family tragedy. The older guy who plays the widowed father is kind of wooden in his delivery, and I was worried about watching him onscreen for an hour and a half, but don't worry, he gets better as the movie progresses, and I think the woodenness in the beginning was a choice on the actor's part, and it kind of does suit the role. The third guy in the elevator is a tough guy in his late teens or early 20s who has a temper and is antsy to get out of the elevator for more reasons than one. I wouldn't want to be trapped in an elevator with ANYONE, but these three people are definitely haunted even before they step foot in the doomed elevator.

I was skeptical at first about whether this movie would truly qualify as a horror movie. It's in the horror section, but it does smack more of "thriller" than "horror" t times. By the end of the movie, though, with the amount of gore and nastiness that I saw onscreen, I think this definitely qualifies as horror. It's basically a slasher film with the body count greatly reduced but the menace and claustrophobia ratcheted up to twenty (after all, where do you hide when you're trapped in an elevator with a killer?) This movie was definitely worth the watch.