Saturday 9 April 2022

Shudder Saturday: The Tombs (2019)

Urgh. Here we go with yet another garbage, and cheap, horror movie from the UK. I don't know how these people keep getting money, but they do. The end results, sadly, often show that you would have been better giving that money directly to Michael, the money-munching monkey of Morocco. That is certainly the case here.

Written by Michael William Smith and directed by Dan Brownlie, this is a tale of a movie promo event that goes horribly wrong. A bunch of people are placed in the London Tombs, located under London Bridge (which was news to me, I mistakenly thought they were just trying to utilise The London Dungeon, which is actually a different attraction), and then a killer starts picking them off. Unfortunately, I've already made this sound better than it is, especially if you're imagining any decent kills and a fun mix of characters. This film has neither.

Jessica Ann Brownlie plays Piper, a woman who is famous for being the final girl in the horror movie that is now getting a much-trumpeted sequel, and I'm going to make the horrible assumption that, despite not being the worst actress I have seen (in any movie, not just in this movie), Brownlie seems to have had a good chance of being cast in a main role thanks to the fact that she's married to the director. Ayvianna Snow is Gigi, the potential new star of the film series, and she is a much better onscreen presence here. There are also depressingly bad performances from Devora Wilde, Jessica Cameron, Danielle Harold (playing a chirpy TV presenter who then turns into some grouchy Eastenders extra when the cameras aren't rolling), and Chris Simmons, playing a paparazzo type named Doug. Anthony Ilott isn't too bad, as the very scared PJ, but I think that may just be in comparison to most of the people around him.

The supernatural killer at the heart of the story has no decent background, nor does he really have any consistent ability to actually kill a lot of people who should be easy pickings for him, and three quarters of this movie is just people wandering around dark rooms and acting scared by their surroundings. I get it, you could probably say that about most horror movies, but this one is so incompetently thrown together that it becomes irritating from the very earliest scenes.

The good news is that it only lasts for 78 minutes. The bad news is that 78 minutes feels like 3 hours here. It's a barrage of bad camerawork, poor lighting, non-special effects, bad acting, bad music, and bad, well, everything. I'll be kind to it because of the less painful turns from Brownlie, Ilott, and Snow, mainly Snow, but this is a film that I recommend everyone else avoids completely. We certainly don't want to encourage the writer or director to come up with a sequel.

2/10

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