Escape Room - Tournament Of Champions

Room With A Boo

Escape Room -
Tournament Of Champions
aka Escape Room 2
USA  2021 Directed by Adam Robitel
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Spoilers as to the survivors of the first movie etc and a couple for this one too.

Escape Room - Tournament Of Champions is the sequel to the same director’s earlier film, Escape Room (reviewed here) which I didn’t know was so well liked. I think I gave it an okay review, if memory serves but I hadn’t realised that the first one was shot for 9 million dollars and made over 150 million back. So of course they were going to make a sequel.

After a brief recap at the start, this film sees the return of the two survivors of the previous movie, Zoe, played by Taylor Russell and Ben, played by Logan Miller. It’s made clear in a couple of ways that the two are still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and it begins properly with Zoe talking to her psychiatrist. And, I have to say, this is the one scene in the movie which is a bit of a disappointment because something happens here which, unless you’re asleep, pretty much tips off a big element of the end twist of the movie. I was waiting for a certain reveal to drop and... oh yeah, it certainly did. But that’s the only really bad thing about the movie and, as for the rest of it, it makes for a really solid, suspense filled thriller, just like the first one.

One thing it doesn’t do, though, is make good on the ‘aeroplane’ ending of the first film, where Zoe and Ben are going to track down the MINOS company and try to reveal them to the world. Instead, it’s revealed that they tried but Zoe has a fear of flying and so, after a while into this one, they drive to New York and, by a bizarre, wafer thin thread of coincidences, suddenly find themselves on an underground train which is uncoupled, diverted and then becomes the new Escape Room starting area. It turns out their fellow passengers in that carriage are all previous survivors of MINOS Escape Rooms and they are now all in this together, playing to survive.

And, the formula is pretty much the same as the first film from hereon in... with some bigger sets with different themes to the rooms this time... such as a bank or a beach with a lighthouse. Zoe, being the brightest spark there, also finds an alternative route out of one of the rooms but her escape is short lived as she and her fellow escapee manage to get pulled back into the next room by a really obvious ploy... but, still, it makes for a fun film and the suspense and tension in the movie makes for some real ‘edge of the seat’ stuff. Which is good because, like the first one, the various kills in this are pretty much bloodless and although it’s implied some nasty stuff happens... and there’s the odd long shot where you can’t see any real details to a couple of deaths... the film swerves away from getting into any gory details (which it could have easily have done if it was going for a higher rating).

There’s also what amounts to a nice extended cameo (which could well stretch into further films) by another actor returning from the first movie... but nothing more on that from me here, don’t want to spoil that one for you. And one of the nice things about the movie is that, again a little bit of a spoiler, it’s got more or less the same ending as the previous movie on this one but, this time, the writers have given themselves no way out for a possible sequel starter... all I’m saying is, the next one will definitely have to start (or more accurately continue) on an aeroplane.

At one point I thought I spotted a mistake in the film but, given the way this one ends, it may have been a deliberate thing. On a news broadcast, it’s stated that four bodies had been found in the warehouse where the events of this movie are alleged to have taken place (bloody huge, high tech warehouse if that’s the case). However, in a certain scene during in the movie, surely two of the bodies were melted... so how could they have been found? So, yeah, not sure but maybe the explanation for that will turn up in the next one.

Other than that... not much more to say on this one other than it was a solid sequel and I had a way more fun and harrowing time than I would normally from a film that’s rated PG13 in the US (and 15 over here, although how the BBFC can justify such a steep rating on this one is anyone's guess... there’s no blood or gore people!). Especially since, again like the first one, the teenagers in the movie are actually likeable people and you are rooting for them, rather then wishing they’d hurry up and die (like a lot of teen targeted movies these days). If you liked the first movie then Escape Room - Tournament Of Champions really shouldn’t disappoint you too much and you’ll probably like the sequel just as much. I do now find myself hoping for a third installment of this franchise at some point soon so, yeah, I hope this one does really well at the box office too.

Escape Room

To Room, It May Concern

Escape Room
2019 USA Directed by Adam Robitel
UK cinema release print.

Warning: A very minor spoiler in this.

Okay, yeah. This is not a bad effort on behalf of the cast and crew to create... well, it’s not actually a horror film but, yeah... a pretty good thriller which takes the old clichéd puzzle solving element of certain serial killer movies and presents it in a way that’s both effective and, it has to be said, quite intense in places.

After a bookend prologue and a preliminary series of sequences, which sets up three of the main protagonists, we have them and a few others invited to play an Escape Room style game with a hefty cash reward if your team makes it out of there alive. These games have, of course, become very popular over the last few years and I've also played two of them in London with some of my friends. I think that this whole idea of a team of contestants trying to solve clues to find their way out of a series of locked rooms all started as an entertaining thing to watch back in the early 1980s with the BBC TV show The Adventure Game (which I was fortunate enough to be able to review in its latest incarnation as a DVD box set here). Various similar things followed in its footsteps and it would be fair to say the modern thriller films like the Saw series, where victims try and escape from various death traps, are a similar cinematic trend.

Escape Room takes the game concept and does exactly this; turns every puzzle room in the suite into a death trap and... there are a couple of slight problems, to my mind, with the movie but they don’t detract from it being an intense and thoroughly entertaining ride of a film, it as to be said. And it cracks along at a fair pace too, with some scenes of almost unbearable suspense.

Surprisingly, for the subject matter, you don’t really see any major gory violence in the film at all and, thankfully, this really doesn’t hamper the movie in any way. Indeed, the director manages to make the whole ‘edge of your seat’ atmosphere of the film fairly bloodless while still keeping you worried about certain characters while knowing, all the while, the situation that one of those characters is going to find themselves in when the film eventually catches up to the opening sequences. It’s a grim proposition, it has to be said, although I wasn’t fooled by certain aspects of that set up and I kinda knew that one of the supposedly dead characters would be returning at some point to act like the cavalry or, at the very least... survive.

However, the film did fool me in that I was pretty sure I knew what the twist ending was going to be but, when we get to that kind of point in the movie, it turned out there was no reveal at all. Everything in the film that’s presented from the start is absolutely all the given facts. So I’m kinda happy about that as I really didn’t need to see a certain solution to the events that take place over the course of the story turn out to be something which has been done to death in recent years on television.

I said there were a couple of weaknesses to the movie and one of those was the fact that we see a set up to three of the main characters. However, when everyone converges on the Escape Room of the title there are a few more characters added into the mix and, while the director does keep giving us little background flashbacks for each character’s back story... it’s pretty obvious that the last three left at one point will be the same three we were ‘briefed’ on by the director at the start of the story. So that was a bit of a telegraphed sequence of moments which I think could have probably been avoidable if the film makers had thought about it.

The other thing I was not so hot on was the last ten minutes of the movie. Once whoever is getting out is out, the director spends an awful long time setting up a very contrived feeling sequence to give the audience a possibility of a sequel, should the time come and this film has sufficient box office clout. Not only that but the last two minutes even shows us... and this is crazy... how the next movie, or at least the next story beats, would play out and so, by this point, I don’t even need to watch the sequel because I already know the plot set up.

That being said though, it didn’t really detract from the sheer intensity of the piece and Escape Room has a lot to recommend it to fans of films like Cube, even with the lack of violence in it. You have some nice sets with some nice puzzles, a whole load of good actors including those main three played by Taylor Russell, Logan Miller and Jay Ellis... not to mention Tyler Labine, who played Dale in Tucker And Dale Versus Evil (which I reviewed here). Added to this we have an interesting score by Brian Tyler and John Carey which... well, there’s a heck of a lot going on in it and I’d need to listen to it divorced from the images to be able to judge it best but it certainly lifts the film a lot. Luckily, Sony Classical have released a CD of it although, sadly, Amazon says it will take two months to ship here for some reason.

However, add this fantastic and orchestrationally dense score to the mix of interesting actors and some quite nicely executed scenarios and, despite those one or two problems I mentioned earlier, you have a pretty good movie in Escape Room. When I went to a Cineworld premiere they had us all walk down a red carpet to receive a small sample of chocolate cake for some reason. I don’t know why they did that because it seemed to have nothing to do with the film and it wasn’t made clear to us just why we should be receiving such a freely given confection but, there you have it. One might think, if one was as suspicious as me, that it was meant to distract one from the quality of the film but, if that was the case, they needn’t have bothered. Escape Room is a solid thriller and I’d certainly recommend this one to people who are fans of piled on suspense in the movies. Just don’t expect a, literal, blood bath. Like I said, it’s not a horror movie... it’s a thriller.

Insidious - The Last Key (Insidious 4)

Insidiouself At home

Insidious - The Last Key (Insidious 4)
2018 USA/Canada Directed by Adam Robitel
UK cinema release print.

I’ve quite enjoyed the Insidious movies as they’ve been released into cinemas so far. Starting with the weakest and least compelling of the series, the original Insidious (reviewed here) was more or less an expansion/remake of the old Little Girl Lost episode of The Twilight Zone. However, both Insidious Chapter 2 (reviewed here) and Insidious Chapter 3 (reviewed here), just like The Purge franchise, took ideas from the concept pitched in that first installment and created much more enthralling and entertaining pictures out of them.

Now one of the important things about what those sequels came to be and what they are, thankfully, continuing to be in the prequel movies (parts 3 and 4) is something which I pointed out in my last review from the series and its something horror seems to do better than certain other genres... change peoples attitudes to what it's possible to portray and get accepted in mainstream movies, by stealth. And by that I mean that what we have in these last couple of films is not just a female action hero carrying the main protagonist role (which is no mean feat by itself) but, also, a 75 year old female action hero (in the form of Lin Shaye as Elise Rainier)  who is wandering around banishing demons and generally getting thrown around by them in a Marvel comics kind of way. I honestly applaud and support these films for this... where else in Hollywood are they giving action roles to heroines who are living past their seventh decade?  So yeah, I wish these films well.

Now, the bad news for me was that this was another prequel to the first two movies, being set chronologically in between the first prequel, Insidious Chapter 3 and the very first Insidious. In fact, this one is set just weeks/days before the events of original film, at the point where Elise enters the narrative of that particular supernatural adventure. Now I was hoping that this installment would finally be a sequel to the end of the second Insidious movie, where the now dead Elise is still looking after her two sidekicks in the form of Specs and Tucker (played in this one again by the film’s writer Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson) from the other side of the spiritual realm known in this series as ‘the further’ and sees something there so terrifying that we need to know who she’s seen.  Alas, the answer to that one is not tackled here, either but, at least the film does take us right up to the first one chronologically so, who knows, if this one does well enough at the box office (it certainly deserves to) then hopefully the writers will have nowhere left to go other than carrying on from that moment in time at the end of the second.

Either way, this is another strong entry in the series which, although I didn’t prefer it as much as the previous two, still entertains and brings the scares when it needs to... not so many scares, for sure but, when it gets those shock moments right, it really manages to get the jump on the audience. Actually, I found it amusing from the chuckles of anticipation and the pent up tension in the auditorium of the screening I went to, mostly from teenage couples, that the horror film is still very much, in some ways, a kind of ‘rites of passage’ experience. I could almost see the hormones bubbling up in some of the couples sitting in my nearest proximity.

So the film starts off with an extended flashback into Elise’s childhood and we begin to see, in this and other flashbacks and, also, in those moments where adventures in ‘the further’ overlap in shifting time zones, how Elise came to be the person she is at the time of this story. We learn just what kind of burden she carries around with her, too... as we meet her family at various points in time. It’s also a nice bit of writing that some of the revelations we find out about Elise’s past are also news to her and we see how she reacts to these reveals as we respond to them ourselves.

The movie goes gets straight to the point with all the supernatural stuff here and, although there are the obvious suspenseful, drawn out scenes of lurking dread in the mix, there is no slow build up reveal to the first presence of the ghostly apparitions and, although this approach maybe shouldn’t work so well, the director seems to really get away with it very well here. It's very rapidly paced and there’s a lot crammed in. Even some of the editing is judicious with short cuts like watching Elise walk through a door in relative close up, towards the camera and then, in the next master shot, cutting to her already being halfway through the next room. It’s something which, perhaps, should seem a little out of place here, when timing in these kinds of films is a crucial element but... nope... it all works quite well and the frights don’t lose too much impact in the scenes which matter in terms of jump scares.

There’s a wonderful sequence where Elise is going through a ventilator shaft (much like Dallas in the first of Ridley Scott’s ALIEN films) and she finds her way blocked in a couple of sections by piles of suitcases. As she goes through each pile, unlocking and opening as she goes, she finds sinister contents I won't reveal here and, as she does so, we are made aware of the old ‘sinister demonic ghost's point of view’ approaching one of the suitcase from behind. Each time Elise has a case lid up, shielding her view of the rest of the shaft in front of her, the ‘ghost camera’ saunters up from behind the lid and, as we cut back to Elise closing it, we assume that something is going to be there with her as she shuts the lid to reveal it and... each time she does it, nothing is revealed. And then, after a few of these cases, we get the expected jump scare but, because the director has deftly used the old clichéd horror syntax of manipulating expectations through shot movement, the audience is effectively blinded by those expectations of just where that ‘attack’ is going to come from. So, yeah, there’s some nice stuff happening here.

We also get a possible set up for a worthy successor to Elise and, it will be interesting to see whether, if they do decide to pick up the hanging thread from the end of the second movie, they bring back this character introduced here to act as the ‘conduit person’ between Elise in ‘the further’ and the real world. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s exactly what this character’s function is here, if the writer and producers are thinking far enough ahead.

As far as bad stuff here... well, two things really.

Once again, composer Joseph Bishara provides an appropriate though somehow more restrained musical score for the film but what he doesn’t do is give it the signature, scare the hell out of everyone, extended dissonance on the revelation of the film’s title at both the start and end of the movie as the previous installments did. This was always part of the fun and I don’t know why the decision was made to not do that this time when it’s become an established part of scoring these films.

Similarly, in terms of continuity... why is this not considered Insidious Chapter Four? While Insidious - The Last Key is an okay title and makes some reference to some truly, nicely surreal uses of keys in this film... it feels almost like the people behind the scenes are bailing out of the timeline they set up in the previous three somehow. Even though it’s certainly evident that this film finds a perfect fit in its place within the series. I don’t understand why that decision was made.

Still, those are my only real complaints and although, as I said, I didn’t quite think this one as strong as the previous two, Insidious - The Last Key is still a great ride for fans of the horror genre and, if you like the Insidious films anyway, surely not one to be missed. Plus, like I said earlier, this film has a main protagonist who is a 75 year old woman... go support this stuff so we can see more films with this option on the table. Send Hollywood that message by plonking down your pennies on stuff like this... I’m glad I did.