Death Tunnel (DVD, 2006)

Simply put, Death Tunnel reminded me quite a bit of 13 Ghosts that never really got off the ground. The director's use of the blurry effect and switching back and forth into a multiple plethora of other effects got really boring after about 10 minutes. The story-line was alright and could have been worked with and fleshed out, but all the characters were so weird and flipped out by the middle of the film that nobody could gather up enough sense to say anything worth listening to.

This film did not have enough narrative or background to explain why the sanatorium was evil until close to the end. The cast was alright but their attitudes were unbearable, so I started actually caring more about the ghosts than I did the intruders. This, in turn, makes you wish the characters would go ahead a die a horrible death rather than watch them be a total idiot and a jerk because I (the viewer) couldn't care less. Death Tunnel failed at keeping my emotion of fear. The film consistently pounded 90+ minutes worth of the most basic jump-scares known to man. These can be defined as quick cuts together with a bunch of industrial noises and screams. Since the storyline didn't make much sense and could not anticipate what was going to happen once the creaking door opened, I became intensely disconnected with the imagery and completely desensitized. I worry that, after this mind-numbing experience of viewing this film one time will have ruined my ability to fall for a really good scary scene again. A few scenes that I think stood out as the most desensitizing were:

-A stereotypical rich, blond, and hateful college girl decides to take a shower in a cold, filthy, and abandoned haunted sanatorium which most definitely shouldn't have running warm water and without a towel in reach. She is completely poker faced throughout the whole process, until somebody turns out the dim light that was hanging over her head and goo starts emanating from the faucet. She immediately gets reduced to a sorry excuse for a crying six year old girl. Why?

-Our hero and his girl get chased down a corridor by a scary guy wearing what looks like an old gas mask decorated with ten feet of gaffing tape and some rubber tubes. He pushes a little trolley with squeaky wheels, has a stiff leg and walks like an 80 year old suffering from Parkinson's. Still the 2 buff teenagers barely managed to outrun him, what is wrong with America's youth these days?

-The hero stands over a supposedly dead girl with a glass shard in her neck, but you can still see her breathing. He just stands there and and looks stupid until the director quickly jerks the body away insinuating that a ghost got her.

-We are shown a long pan down a filthy morgue hall filled with plenty of corpses that have been dismembered and hollowed out. There are five tables in the middle on which five presumably dead bodies are lying. Our hero tries to find his darling by looking under every single of the the sheets while mumbling: "Heather, is this you?" in slow motion. By body number four, one half of the audience is asleep while the other half decides to leave the room from sheer boredom.

I feel extremely bad for those slating a film that must have been produced by people with a lot of enthusiasm and little budget, but as a viewer, I felt offended by the lack of vision and understanding for the horror genre. Is it irony or poetic justice that the first feature film of the female lead Steffany Huckaby was career suicide?

I have rarely come across a movie which is quite as blatantly nonsensical as Death Tunnel. But Death Tunnel isn't just dumb, it's real dumb! It doesn't have any desire to make sense. It's a ludicrous rip-off of Saw. Good God,
couldn't they have done better than that? Oh, they use a pathetic, and phony, "based on a true story" setup to try to sell itself.

Now there is a rundown mental hospital in Kentucky, but that's about where the truth of Death Tunnel (oh God, that title) ends. As near as I can tell, the film not only makes no sense, it's told in flash-forward for the bulk of the movie. Confusing!

OK... The film begins in a bar. Five coeds with the largest breasts are recruited (or sort-of kidnapped) to participate in a game (or some kind of torture) in the aforementioned abandoned mental institution. The girls are knocked out, bound, and their faces covered with gas masks. When they wake up, they're in the hospital with unclear goals. I thought (presumed) they're supposed to escape. A voice over the intercom intones the film's catchphrase --"five floors, five girls, five hours" -- which is somehow the basis for the movie. As implausible as the setup is, it actually gets worse. Girls murder each other, then take showers -- showers -- in the dank, "freezing" sanitarium??!! Hey, I'm all for the flesh, but not if I can actually feel my brain rotting into mush while I'm watching it.

Ultimately the film borrows from many movies besides Saw, the most blatant being The Shining. And, to paraphrase Jack, all atmosphere and no plot makes Death Tunnel a very dull movie. (LOL!) Not funny though!

There's too many copy cat ideas being 'border line' stolen and it's still not good. Avoid this unless you want to see the nudity and that still is only worth less the 5 dollars on eBay WITH the shipping and the handling. Use your discretion.

Loved this movie! I'm actually from the place the movie was filmed. and i went to that hospital on halloween. Had to own this movie!

I rated this as a good movie, because it was, in spite of going a little over the top with the buckets of blood. I saw the Ghost Hunters episode about the sanitorium and thought the movie could have done a little more in the suspence area, and a little less in the bloos splattering. Don't get me wrong, I like a good blood fest as much as the next degenerate, but in some cases the film makers go a little overboard, and for no real reason. There were enough stories and scary things that could have been put into the movie without all the jumping around from scene to scene, and loud screaming for no apparent reason. I would still recommend it to horror buffs, especially goremysters, but this could have been done much better.

I bought this movie because I personally visited the Hospital where it was filmed. The building is a very creepy place and I wanted to add the movie to my horror collection. Not the best movie I have ever seen but fun to watch.