I’ve seen it all before, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like seeing it again. A look at three familiar plots from a weekend marathon on Netflix.
NO ESCAPE ROOM (2018)
Yep, it’s another escape room movie. If you don’t like this trendy subgenre, then don’t even bother. If you do like it, you get more of what you expect, plus something a little different—that defies logic in the end.
An angsty teen daughter is stuck with her dad on a road trip. The car breaks down in the middle of bumfuck and they have to kill time while it’s being repaired. She smartly points out that the escape room attraction her father comes upon is probably not safe in hillbilly land. But…they go anyway.
Along with a handful of other people (including a hunk), they have to find their way out of an entire house, room by room, after being told a story of tragedy that occurred at the house and locked five people within its walls.
Hey, it has some cheap thrills and some okay suspense moments, and I didn’t in any way find it a waste of time.
But it definitely feels like it was left requiring a sequel for any of it to make sense, and an entire second movie just for that would be a waste of my time.
NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE (2021)
This fairly entertaining film is so filled with typical, repetitive scares that they just negate the quick pace. I’ve really had my fill of glimpses of ghostly apparitions in the background in horror movies. You get them ad nauseam here to the point that the main character runs through a room and they just keep popping up left and right. Sigh.
Anyway, this is the story of an undocumented immigrant who works a lousy job and takes a room in a cheap boarding house run by a man who only rents to women.
She immediately starts hearing odd noises and soon begins seeing those apparitions.
In the meantime, she struggles with some issues concerning her immigration status, but this isn’t a movie that is going to get the anti-woke crowd worked up—actually it will just because the word immigrant is used. However, her status really plays little part in the arc of the story other than the fact that she is perhaps considered an easier target for an evil plot that requires people to go missing and never be seen again.
It all comes down to there being something going on in the basement of the building. There’s definitely an awesome creature. Unfortunately, this movie absolutely fails to explain the rules of just how this legend works—it is based on a book, so perhaps it was made clearer in the novel.
For viewers it feels like a “chapter” is left out of the film. The main character finds herself chained up in a seemingly impossible to escape situation, and then suddenly…she’s just…free. Just like that. I did one of those “ending explained” searches on the internet and still wasn’t buying it. It’s infuriating, and it makes any thrills delivered in the denouement void of any impact whatsoever. And by the way, if you make a movie and then discover there are loads of “ending explained” posts about it on the internet…you fucked up.
DON’T KILL ME (2021)
When a movie starts with a guy speeding down a winding mountain road with his girl in the passenger seat guiding him to stay on the road as “Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd plays, I’m definitely immediately immersed in the action.
After that, Don’t Kill Me becomes another fairly typical vampire/zombie hybrid horror romance.
The couple swears they will spend eternity together, they die together…and she inexplicably comes back from the dead and crawls out of her crypt at the mausoleum.
She soon discovers she’s rotting, that she needs to feed on people to feel better, and that vampire hunters are on her tail.
All the while, the plot is interspersed with flashback scenes revealing how the relationship between she and her boyfriend started and grew.
It’s entertaining enough for what it is, but there is really not a thing here you haven’t seen before in other movies.
