Customer Reviews

Death Tunnel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(25)

 

 

Five girls. Five floors. Five hours. And believe you me, it will feel like every second of five hours before you finally reach the light at the end of the tunnel that is The End. Now I knew going in that most people hated this movie, but I still wanted to see it, dadgummit. After all, five sexy coeds in a haunted sanitorium can't be all that bad, can it? The answer is a resounding Yes - it can and is that bad. This isn't the kind of bad movie that totally amateur filmmakers might go out and shoot over the course of a weekend, either. It takes a lot of hard work and effort to make a horror movie this wretchedly awful. Apparently, it helps when the producer and director dress like Axl Rose. The direction is terrible, jumping back and forth between the actual initiation and the leadup to it for at least the first half of the film and leaving a number of logistical questions completely unanswered. Still, the brunt of the blame must fall upon the writers of this incoherent mess, for they truly deserve to be run out of town by a mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers.

Kentucky's Waverly Hills Sanatorium serves as an ideal setting for the horrors that were supposed to be unleashed here (in fact, the most interesting thing on the whole DVD is the descriptions by cast and crew of some of the spooky things they really experienced there), but Death Tunnel does no favors to the very real history of this medical institution. The filmmakers reportedly used some actual EVP recordings in the movie, but, unfortunately, there is no explanation as to how these were obtained.

At least the five girls aren't bad looking at all, especially lead actress Steffany Huckaby. Don't look for too much in the way of nudity, however, as the filmmaking Booth Brothers obviously don't subscribe to the old "the worse the movie is, the more nudity you show" tradition (if they did, they would have had no need for a costumer at all). Not a single character is given an ounce of substance, so you could care less if and how any of them might die. What you have here are just five college girls chosen for a special initiation at a Truth or Scare party. One girl is deposited on each of the five floors (except they put two of them together for no apparent reason), and they have five hours to get out of the place by way of the infamous Death Tunnel. They know all this, and there are pictures and newspaper clippings everywhere identifying the place as an old sanitorium, yet it takes Heather, supposedly the smart one, almost seventy-five minutes to figure it out (which takes something away from what is supposed to be a climactic scene). And the ending? Don't even get me started on the ending.

A lot of work went into the special effects, but it's just a list of all your usual suspects - blurred images, shaking cameras, and computer-generated ghosts up the wazoo. In other words, it's nothing we haven't seen before, especially in the past few years. Personally, I found Death Tunnel about as scary as cutting my toenails. I could be nice and say the filmmakers probably just tried too hard to make this movie scary, but there's no getting beyond the fact that this is one rotten egg stinker of a horror movie.

What the Heck did I just watch here? Appearently, Death Tunnel is based on the true life hauntings of a Kentucky Sanatorium (actually used in the film) where thousands were sent and died of various dieases like Tuberculosis. The "Death Tunnel" as the title implies, was a shaft that the dead were taken through and carted away....

...but all that doesn't matter because that's not what this movie's about. Simply put, five empty-headed girls are brought to the sanatorium for some initiation to survive for five hours. But unknown to them, they all have some sort of family tie to it's previous generation's victims, and the ghosts are anything but pleased they're there.

Ah, blah blah blah, it doesn't make any difference because this movie stinks. Playing out like some decent looking rip-off between House On Haunted Hill '99 and Thir13en Ghosts '01, it's really hard to follow. It jumps all over the place from present, past, and not ever happening in an instant. And even if there was a little more nudity in this film it still wouldn't make me care any more about them. The acting's weak...so weak that if I wanted to see five over-hysterical women act this badly, I'd go tell my wife's family the turkey's dry at Thanksgiving. The only real reason this flix is gettin a 5 from me is the included documentary on the actual Waverly Hills Sanatorium which is more entertaining than the movie it's based on. And yes, the cinematography's not so bad, and it looked like it had a decent budget, but nothing could scare up a worthwhile script no matter how crazy you are. I think I want my $3 back.
(RedSabbath Rating:5.0/10)

Ok, so alot of people are taking this WAYYY to seriously. If you watch the movie and just enjoy it for what it is and just be OPEN-MINDED, you will love this movie. The acting is a little flawed, the plot has minor holes, however the scare factor is very good.

I watched this movie late at night when browsing through iControl, and I loved it. Just the idea of being locked in a sanitorium where over 60,000 people died is horrifying. Personally, I LOVE being scared, so I opened my mind to this movie.

All in all, just keep and open mind and watch this movie; it will scare you if you let it. (STOP BEING SO UPTIGHT!)

Wow. I'll admit it. I saw phrases like haunted hospital and five coeds, and I bought this movie sight unseen. And let me say that first part again: Wow. There was so little sustenance here as to barely even constitute a movie. I found myself fascinated, more so because the story dealt with five nubile coeds in lingerie. I guess I'm just the sentimental type.

The movie involved five coeds being drawn together, dressed in little lingerie outfits each with one letter to spell the word D-E-A-T-H. Chills. The blood goes cold.

The Good: Crap aficionados may recognize the pixyishly attractive Heather as the prettiest girl from the abysmally abortive Scarecrow Gone Wild; she was the girl who was chased through the haystack labyrinth only to die as a precursor to the rest of the movie. Admittedly, I was also strongly drawn to the plump little villainess Ashley, who wasted no time in getting naked. Her dialogue did make me cringe, but I didn't care, I soldiered right on through it. Also, I'd like to mention Devon, a sultry exotic creature who balanced nicely against the two feisty blondes.

The Bad: With the exception of the coeds, everyone else made me nostalgic for the time I had my wisdom teeth removed. The suck factor was the dominant beast, I'm sorry to say, a terrible ravening entity, consuming everything with its vacuous force. Pretty much all of the supernatural element was a watered-down version of the same stuff from the remake of The House On Haunted Hill. I watched the documentary also included on the disk, and the filmmakers claimed to have actually put various recorded phantasma inside the movie. I watched it again, and lost my focus in favor of the coeds once again.

The Ugly: Zero focus. No cohesive element. No drive. No irony. They relied too much on the presence of the dank and virulent hospital itself, which was at least effective in its own rite, but not enough to glue the movie together. But you can get the same effect from Session 9, while simultaneously getting a terse and edgy movie in the process. I think the word plot is N/A in this particular situation, but further disappointments included the unexplained goggle-ghost that prowled the hospital throughout the movie with a clean-up cart, the ghost of the evil doctor who was literally a cliché-spewing machine, and the death tunnel itself, the purported focus of the entire movie---which got less play than poor doe-eyed Heather during her bit part in Scarecrow Gone Wild.

Would I recommend this movie? I don't feel qualified to say. But I do recommend the five coeds, and thus, in light of their brave and buoyant contribution to this desultory effort, I award this faux-movie three stars. I do not regret buying it, and have actually watched it four times.

I'm giving this DVD an extra star for the extras alone. The story of Waverly Hospital is a very scary and disturbing tale of disease, corruption and death. That's what I got from the extras. There is a potentially horrific movie that the extras promise. That movie would be a straight documentary - and the obviously earnest filmmakers might want to make that instead of trying to sell this drivel.

As far as the actual movie is concerned - forget it. Maybe in 10 years, we'll see this movie as a time capsule of early millenium filmmaking cliches, but as a movie to rent out from Blockbuster it's an imitative amalgamation of better movies. Freaky video techniques from The Ring. Check. Hot co-eds in trashy outfits from Sorority Massacre. Yep. Abandoned large building with greasy walls and constant dripping via Hostel and Nine Inch Nails videos. Check. Gratuitous nude scene from the least attractive actress in the movie. Oh yeah. Flashbacks that are supposed to explain the mystery but just confuse. Sure thing. Ghosts running through the halls. Yep. Video torture scenario from Saw. Of course. Originality? Dialogue? Characterization? Anything to recommend this movie over the rest of the imitators? No. No. Nope. Hell no.

A bunch of co-eds get trapped in a haunted hospital as part of Fraternity prank. Only it really is haunted and they start dying. Spooky right? Not in the slightest. The mood music keeps telling you that you should be scared but the action and the characters keep you at bored. You don't like these people. You don't care about them. The evil girl is slightly entertaining, but she obviously got the job by being the producer's girlfriend. The editor had a lot of fun keeping things non-linear (flashback. College scenes. In hospital scenes. College scenes. Flashback.) and you suspect that he was deciding what went where by rolling dice. That does not make an artistic achievement (although it adds Tarantino non-linear storytelling to the list of derivative techniques).

All in all, this is a movie that you have to be drunk to enjoy and the amount of alcohol you need to buy this from Amazon has not been invented. Of course, it's a straight-to-DVD horror movie, but there's been some good solid DYI stuff in the straight-to-DVD horror genre. Not that I can think of anything at the moment, but this is definitely not one of the contenders.

I dont normally bother writing reviews because i know everyone has their own opinions and everyone likes different things, but if i can save at least one person from this awful movie it will be worth it. There are plenty other reviews that have pointed out all the problems with this movie so i will try not to just repeat them... but the first clue that this film was going to be bad was in the opening credits "shot, cut, and directed by philip adrian booth"! this means you are either dealing with an egomaniac or there was a very limited amount of creative forces at work. "shot" (aka filmed) with a 12 gauge, "cut" (aka edited) with a razor blade into a billion pieces and then taped back together randomly. if you are interested in this film PLEASE do not purchase it... i will gladly send you my copy which i paid 7.50 for and still feel cheated. if you have seen this movie... why did they never simply walk downstairs and try to go out the door? or even go out one of the many busted out windows? ive recently been to waverly hills and i know for a fact that they have just now started rennovating and replacing the windows... when this movie was filmed there werent any windows in the building! its evident in one of the first scenes! i hate this film and anyone who had anything to do with it!

Atmosphere means a lot in a film, and abandoned hospitals are perfect settings for horror movies. Session 9 turned the Danvers State Mental Hospital into a terrifying character unto itself; Autopsy took every fear of hospitals and crammed them into a Grand Guignol. Death Tunnel uses the Waverly Hills Sanatorium as its main set, trusting that the decaying shell of the hospital will carry the story. And for five minutes, Waverly Hills is a pretty disturbing place.

But then five bimbos show up dressed in lingerie. As part of a hazing ritual, they must survive five hours in Waverly Hills. The girls don't like each other, of course. It's never actually demonstrated why this is the case; because there isn't enough dialogue to generate any character development; we have to simply accept that the characters don't like each other, presumably due to some rivalry over the hunky male lead who helps coordinate the contest.

It's amazing just how shallow Death Tunnel is. It uses every trick in the horror book: a Psycho-like shower scene, a creepy Saw-like voice, and a sepia-colored lens that has been in every horror movie ever. It throws in stuttering images, blurry ghosts, and plenty of shrieking sound effects. Horror movies are often derided for the cheap scares generated by random squeals to jolt the audience - Death Tunnel has to be the first movie made up EXCLUSIVELY of this trick.

The acting is bad. The plot is derivative. The editing is terrible. The audio is irritating. It's not even campy. Death Tunnel is like someone played a Halloween special effects CD on random and then turned on Chat Roulette. Actually, if you did that you'd get a better movie than this tripe.

Death Tunnel (Philip Adrian Booth, 2005)

I finished watching this movie and thought to myself, "Man, this was a movie with so very much potential, and every last bit of it was strangled, frame by frame, with the kind of glee that only the truly incompetent can manage."

Yes, I thought that. In exactly those words. So don't get on me about it, okay?

Plotwise, the beginning of the movie is rather confusing, but then maybe some colleges do things differently than mine did. Richie (Undressed's Jason Lasater), the charismatic leader of some sort of campus social club, emcees a party at which five girls are chosen to spend five hours during the night at a local, supposedly haunted, abandoned hospital-- Devon (Melanie Lewis, who has the disticntion of having appeared in both Gigli AND From Justin to Kelly!), Elizabeth (Yolanda Pecroraro in her first big-screen role), Ashley (Cemetery Gates' Kristin Novak), Tori (TV character actor Annie Burgstede), and Heather (Disconnect's Steffany Huckaby). There's a lot of foreshadowing kind of stuff that makes very little sense, given how little we actually learn about these women (and everyone else) before we get to the hospital, but I was willing to overlook that because the stuff intercut with all the foreshadowing and attempts at character building was quite intriguing-- newspaper clips flying around the screen about the depravity at the hospital, voiceovers, hints at assorted nastiness, that sort of thing. It rather seemed the filmmakers were going to do something more interesting with the backstory than they were with what was happening in the present, which would certainly have been an interesting approach. This, of course, went out the window pretty quick once we got everyone to the hospital itself. There the movie becomes your basic supernatural-slasher flick, with more time spent on devising interesting ways to do people in than with such trivialities as plot, characterization, pacing, and the like. And, of course, we get the typical, predictable ending with one surviving character, one redeemed villain, and the oh-so-surprising revelation that you saw coming five minutes into the film.

We have recently been blessed with a number of fantastic microbudget indie horror films (Deadbirds immediately comes to mind); Death Tunnel, despite all the possibilities inherent in it, is not one of them. Avoid it unless you find yourself with nothing better to do on a Saturday night. * ½

Good story, scary set and some decent acting. Scared the hell out of my girl friend, a big plus in my book.
The good looking cast, minor nudity and gore sure help to push the film along .
I could have done with out the count down, I did not need help with that ( I don't want to give anything away here).
Rent it or buy it used.

Philip Adrian Booth's 2005 film "Death Tunnel" is a well-made horror flick about five college gals (in lingerie) locked in a huge abandoned sanatorium in Kentucky where 63,000 people died of the "white plague" in the early 20th century. This is supposed to be a college prank, but things go sour when the ghosts of the plague victims show up!

I was surprised to discover the acting was quite good by all involved, at least for a Grade B horror flick. I say "surprised" because a few armchair critics diss the film for the supposed bad acting.

That's not to say the film is good, however. "Death Tunnel" is very stylistic and well-made, to be sure. One reviewer properly points out the "extremely impressive visual style combined with top notch kinetic editing work." This is absolutely true, but -- unfortunately -- "Death Tunnel" commits the worst sin of cinema: it's boring. The simple plot is presented in a very convoluted, uninteresting, unsuspenseful manner. There are so many flashbacks, flashforwards and flashbetweens it gets confusingly dull fast. Another negative is that "Death Tunnel" is sometimes too derivative of other films, like "Saw" and a couple others.

That's a pity because the locations, style and cast are superb. The film was largely shot at Waverly Hills Sanatorium, Louisville, KY, which is a perfect location for a horror flick. The film also features a few ultra-hot girls trying in vain to get out of the sanatorium and there is a genuine aura of creepiness & a few good scares. Plus the modern metal song "Disconnected" by 9 Volt Revolt is great (featured in both the story and the end credits). So the film's not a total loss.

The filmmakers are professionals with impressive skills, there's no doubt, but they need to learn a thing or two about proper storytelling -- coherent story, character development, suspense build-up, etc. As it is, it's just a bunch of stylistic and grisly overKILL from the getgo and it gets old real quick.

GRADE: C