Long ago in the Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky 63,000 people died of something called the white plague. To get rid of all the corpses that were filling up the hospital, they built an underground tunnel to put the bodies there, a death tunnel. In present time, 5 girls have been chosen to spend 5 hours in the sanatorium and try to make it out alive. The sanatorium itself consist of 5 floors and is haunted by 5 ghosts. The girls have been separated from each other and the only way out seems to be through the death tunnel.
I had heard so many bad things about Death Tunnel, so when starting to watch it my expectations were very low. On the other hand, I thought that maybe that was a good thing since then it might turn out better than I had expected it to be for. Well, it sure didn't. Death Tunnel is actually like watching a 97 minute long flashy music video, and while that might be somewhat cool for a minute or two, after a while it just becomes brutally annoying.
The movie starts out with full-on horror right away, but since we have no background story or for that matter know the characters, the scares are not very effective. Then the movie jump back and forth between these girls in school, when they're attending a party were they get chosen to be the 5 girls to spend time in the sanatorium, and when they first arrive in the sanatorium as well. There are a lot of flashbacks, but it's still pretty easy to follow without getting lost. Some reviews I read earlier on this movie stated that it jumps between different times too much and that it was hard to keep track of everything. It's actually not, and I think they managed to do and show this pretty well to get the movie going.
Each one of the girls wake up in different rooms with some kind of mask over their heads, and a voice tells them that there's a key on the floor that will unlock their mask and after that they're free to go and explore the floor they're on....if they dare! Sheesh...
This could've been one hell of a horror movie because, if nothing else, it sure has the surroundings going for it. The sanatorium is dark, dirty and looks a lot like Silent Hill if you've ever played those games. Unfortunately they manage to do nothing with the creepy surroundings and even if we get tons of scares, they are so cheap and non-effective it's absolutely ridiculous. They've also thrown in tons of creepy and sudden sounds and noises into the movie, and that's something that makes the scares feel even cheaper, if possible.
We get to follow the different girls when they walk around on the different floors, they run into ghosts, they hear strange things, and weird things happen all the time. This is all just a load of flashy crap that does nothing for the viewer. 40 minutes into the movie I found myself to be bored out of my mind, things were happening in the movie all the time, but everything's just so stupid and pointless that you couldn't care less. An hours into the movie and till it finished, I couldn't stop looking at the time display on the dvd-player to see how much more of this I would have to take.
If I had to describe Death Tunnel with one word it would be uninteresting because that is truly what this flick really is. It's like the people who made it just focused on adding more and more horror elements into the movie, and forgot to have a solid script, hire actors that could actually act, have at least a tiny bit of character development and so on and so forth. It's just scare after scare that does not work, and all this combined with constant flashy gruesome imagery, that in the end does not come out to be as gruesome after all.
There's actually a story, with these 5 girls and one guy being in the sanatorium, all that have a link to the place, and getting deeper and deeper into that. The story's not that bad, but the way they made it is, and it ends up not working on any level whatsoever.
Gore? No not really, a little but nothing much. I read that there was gonna be some nudity, but it's just a shower scene that's not worth the time. Death Tunnel gets a rating of 2 out of 10. One point for having pretty hot girls in it that are nice to look at, and one point for the way the sanatorium looks, but that's it.
Looked like it really could've been something and had a few things going for it, but after a while you just noticed what a piece of trash this flick turned out to be. Do yourself a favor and avoid it.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2005
DIRECTOR: Philip Adrian Booth
WRITING CREDITS: Philip Adrian Booth, Christopher Saint Booth
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Steffany Huckaby, Kristin Novak, Jason Lasater
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 97 min
RATING: 2/10
Death Tunnel Website/IMDB Click here
Death Tunnel Trailer Click here
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