Vanishing on 7th Street (2010)

When most of the worlds population suddenly disappears, the few survivors are plagued by a living darkness which takes any human it touches.

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247°F (2011)

4 freinds, go to stay in a luxury cabin, owned and built by one of their uncles.
Before heading to a nearby festive, the decide to use the cabin's sauna, but the door jams, and the controls are on the outside. With the uncle out for the night, water running low, and the temperature rising, it's up to the group to find a way to survive.

Back in Shocktober 2010 (wow, my reviews were short then!) I reviewed "Frozen" comparing it to Adrift, with a ski lift instead of water, so it seems odd that my first thought on this movie was "so, they've made 'Frozen' with heat instead of cold!", but, that really does seem to be the formula here.

What the movie gets right, is having an array of things the group can try, compared to Frozen's two options of 'wait' or 'jump'. This is exploited to the fullest by having someone intelligent in the mix - the main guy weighs up the pros and cons of every plan the group can think of.

Frankly, the lack of characterisation killed this one for me; in a movie spent mostly in one place, with a small group of people, those people are everything... Here, I just didn't feel their plight.

FULL REVIEW EXCLUSIVELY ON THE CINEPHILAICS HERE

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Disclaimer:
If you look through the archives, you'll see that I've been using "Bought from Poundland" as a tag since at least 2011.

At the end of October 2013 I decided that all of my 2014 movies would be purchased from Poundland, and began buying up horror movies, to ensure I would have enough come October 2014.

In March 2014 I took a part time job at Poundland.

In accordance with the companies social media policy, in September 2014 I contacted Poundland's social media team to check that I would be okay to carry on with my plan to use the "bought from Poundland" tag.

I have been given the go-ahead on condition that I make the following clear:

All the reviews on this blog are entirely the opinion of Will Tingle, the reviews are not endorsed by Poundland in any way and (as should be obvious from some of the more scathing ones) are certainly not reviews I have been paid to write.

In short: The views expressed in this blog are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Poundland or it's owners, shareholders, or  management.

Stitches (2009)

aka, Sutures

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A group of freinds, most of them medical students, head out to a rented house in the middle of nowhere on vacation, Where they are hunted down by a mysterious man.
They wake up in an underground bunker, which is being used as an illegal medical school,, where kidnap victims are given diseases or injuries, and the students of the underground school are tasked with stabilising them. Succeed or fail, once the victims are finished with, they are harvested for organs.

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The Terror Within (1989)

On post apocalyptic earth, supplies are running low for a group of survivors living deep underground in a military research bunker. Trips to the surface are fraught with danger thanks to "Gargoyles" - monstrous humanoid creatures which now roams the earth.
When the team rescue the sole survivor of a camp of humans who have somehow until recently survived above ground, they unwittingly let a Gargoyle into their bunker.

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The Cellar Door (2007)

When Rudy goes to her friends house for a 'girls night in' they both end up passing out drunk.
She wakes up in a wooden crate, in a basement, as the prisoner of a socially awkward man, named Herman.
All Herman wants to do is keep her happy in her box, but sometimes she says mean things to Herman, or won't co-operate with him, and when she upsets Herman, she makes him do bad things...

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The movies prologue sees Herman's previous obsession escaping, and her subsequent murder. I get that they wanted to give the movie a dramatic lead-in but later, when Rudy realises she is not the first woman that Herman has 'kept', it's a big thing for her, and it's lacking some of its punch for us as we already know. Another small thing is that his previous victim was blonde, whereas Rudy is a redhead... To me, I'd have liked to have seen Herman always kidnap a similar looking woman, but again, it's a minor gripe. 

The Shrine

A young man is the latest in a long line of backpackers to go missing in Eastern Europe, only to have his belongings show up in an airport elsewhere on the continent weeks later.
When a journalist traces his last known whereabouts to a village in Poland, she heads out with her assistant and reluctant photographer boyfriend to solve the mystery.
Things take a nasty turn when she decides to investigate an unmoving and mysterious patch of dense perpetual fog in the woods on the village's outskirts, and finds an imposing statue that the villagers would rather she hadn't seen...

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The Collection (aka The Collector 2) (2012)

The Collector's MO of killing a building full of people to kidnap one continues... But this time his trophy is the daughter o a very rich man who sends a team of mercenaries to retrieve her.
And if you think he makes his victims houses deadly, wait until you see him on home turf...

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The Purge (2012)

In the year 2022 the New Founding Fathers of America have ushered in a new age of peace and prosperity; Crime is at an all time low, and unemployment is down to 1%.
The secret of the New Founding Father's success is "The Purge", an annual event in which, for 12 hours, Emergency services are suspended, and all crime is legal.
James Sandin sells security systems specifically intended to keep those who can afford them safe during The Purge. After locking his family home down for the night, his son takes pity on a man who is being hunted, and disarms the system long enough to let him in.
The man's pursuers soon show up and offer the Sandins an ultimatum: deliver him alive before the gang's heavy equipment arrives, or they will force their way in and kill everyone inside.
Can the Sandins find the man, now hiding in their home, and if they can find him, can they bring themselves to turn him over?

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No Man's Land: Rise of the Reeker (Reeker 2)

An outgoing Sheriff and his son (the incoming sheriff) are talking shop at a diner/motel when 3 casino robbers arrive.
It isn't long before both groups are terrorised by the foul smelling ghost of a serial killer that the sheriff captured 30 years ago.

Inbred

4 troubled teen on probation are taken on a team building weekend to a remote village, where it's clear the locals aren't used to outsiders.
A relatively minor incident with a few local youths soon escalates into a nightmare.

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Last House on the left (2009 Remake)

While staying in her family's summer house, Mari goes to meet her friend, Paige, in town, together they go back to a motel with Justin, a boy they just met, to smoke some weed.
Unfortunately Justin's father, Krugg, along with his brother and girlfriend (who just hijacked the police transport vehicle that was taking Krugg to prison)  return to the motel earlier than expected.
The gang torture the girls, rape them and leave them for dead, then stranded by a storm in the middle of nowhere, go to the nearest house they can find to seek shelter.
Little do the gang know, the house is Mari's parent's summer house... and when they work out what has happened to their daughter, and who is responsible they do what any good parents would... they take justice into their own hands.

The Descent.

Partial synopsis (seriously, don't read a full synopsis until you have seen the movie: don't even read the back of the damn DVD case):

Six women go on a caving holiday, and things go wrong. Hundreds of feet underground, with no hope of rescue, it is up to them to try to save themselves and find their own way back to the surface.

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Strangeland (AKA Dee Snider's Strangeland)

When a couple of girls go online looking for a party and get chatting to Capt. Howdy (Snider), they get more than they bargained for.
His profile lists Howdy as a college student into R&B, Hip-Hop and snow boarding... Reality has him as a sadistic 'modern savage', who lures people into his basement to 'help' them evolve spiritually through various rights of passage... including tattoos, branding, piercing, scarification, and suspension.

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Dark Floors

An Hospital elevator breaks down with 6 people on board (A security guard, a nurse, a self-centred business man, a older male patient, an autistic girl and her father), when it starts working again, the doors open on an abandoned hospital, with no apparent way out. Movements in the shadows and on reflections soon turn out to be more than tricks of the light.

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Death Tube

A snuff gameshow site "Deathtube" appears on the internet only a couple of times a year, and never for more than a week; routed through several off-shore servers, law enforcement (if they even know about it) are apparently powerless to track down the site's runners.
Soon after hearing about it, our hero wakes up on-set, he soon learns he is one of 8 'Players', are the games (as they claim to be) co-operative, or are they actually competitive? how many of the players can survive, and how many are allowed to?

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