El juego del ascensor

This is not terrible by any means. I can imagine that with someone like Sam Raimi at the helm this might have become a decent, scary little horror film. However what we have is TikTok driven fan fiction.

There are one or two jump scares here and there but none of it makes any sense.

The major problem is the acting or rather the over acting, the over emoting, the actors and their total lack of talent. Everyone is absolutely awful. So bad that we end up rooting for the elevator demon type thingy.

There may be another one, who can say. It was obviously filmed on a small budget however it didn't crack a million at the box office.

Another unimaginative, sub-mid shovel-ware movie. Nothing really stands out, the acting was lethargic and absolutely nothing stood. This is the kind of movie you throw out when you are vacuuming and folding laundry. That's probably the best thing I can say about it.

This movie feels like another low-effort offering for 12 to 14 year olds that want to get into Horror movies and this movie will gently hold their hand and ease them into things. The antagonist is simply called "The 5th Floor Woman", and that's fine. I didn't really care to invest enough brain cells thinking too hard about how this movie pandered to kids who think the Back Rooms or Slenderman are scary.

I call this kind of offering "Sesame Street Horror" because it basically spoon feeds you mild jump scares for an hour and a half.

The Elevator Game is a simple premise of a film: horror video blog just out of high schoolers need a quick and spooky idea for their channel to keep a sponsor. Thus, the decide on the Elevator Game that evokes the Fifth Floor Woman and her Red World.

The simple premise does lower the overall film as there isn't much more to the plot than this. (There is one minor twist about halfway through that is ultimately worthless for any deviation from the plotting.) Characters aren't bad for 2 dimensional, and acting is decent inside of these characters.

There is enough creepiness in the moments that do occur that I kind of liked this film. Ending is tired retread of other films, and most likely a sad attempt of the producers to allow for a sequel. Really? We need a sequel for a simple film?

Not saying it's great by far, but I gave a 6 as it did keep me watching without any yawns or sassy back talk to the film.

What a shower of crap. Just sat through this childish supposed to be, wanna be, horror film and hate myself for doing so.

It's like an episode Goosebumps,only with worse acting and less scares.

With a very low budget and very dislikeable characters,you just end up disliking everything about it.

I sometimes wonder why these films are even made because who in their right minds would enjoy making or watching stuff like this?

So anyway they've taken a game I'm sure everyone's heard about and actually had a chance to make something that could have been at least watchable. However they failed badly, buy just making a teen type cringefest.

If I were you I'd avoid this like the plague.

From the jump you can tell this is going to be your quintessential, un-self-aware indie horror with questionable acting, script and plot.

For the first 45 minutes it is exactly that, but in an unoffending way. You have your expected token characters with their quippy banter that isn't as clever as they think it is and some community theater like acting... and it's fine for the most part. It then hits a climax scene and it is... jarring to say the least. I don't know why literally anyone on set didn't tell the actor playing Kris that he was not in an off broadway production of The Shining, but I was literally sitting on my couch actively cringing throughout that entire scene... and honestly at that point I blame direction. From then on it pretty steadily goes down hill. I would say it was riddled with plot holes but Swiss cheese is just made that way so we will let it go...

On a positive note, I will say when the creep factor hit, it was pretty solid at times. A lot of the kills and the gore were pretty cool and I was surprisingly impressed with the sfx/cgi. I will say however, the makeup for the ghost/demon was unsuccessful and was serving up Party City body paint unfortunately. The movie also looked quite nice in general. Good picture quality and solid shots/editing. As far as acting went, the folks who played Chloe and Matty had some potential, but everything just felt so stilted and unintentionally campy that there wasn't much room for success regardless. It felt like maybe this was a first go around for the majority of the cast and in the least patronizing way possible, everything is a learning experience and not everything is always going to be your best work and that's okay.

At large, while still retaining some positive attributes, this movie didn't hit the way they wanted it to. I wouldn't say it was unsuccessful per se, but there were many variables that added up to a very amateurish fruition. I think that the cast and crew should still be proud of what they accomplished but as far as recommendation goes, I would probably have to say to pass on this one.