Les emmurés

I had high hopes for this movie after seeing the trailer. This could have been a good movie, but... The production team seemed to have run out of money, and then had to wrap it up really fast half way through, causing a hasty and staggering series of quick shots with "one-take" scenes. This, obviously, made the actors look bad and that's a shame. They did a good job at the beginning of the film. The first 20-30 minutes of the movie is actually pretty good, but I'll save you the time by saying that it went downhill FAST. I'll give you perspective that the budget of a film means nothing to me. Sure, I love the special effects that make the big-budget films soar and help tell the story, but I like the low-budget, indie films just as well, provided it tells a good story. This film has neither. When they started to rush, they lost the viewer by getting off track, and seemingly changing the actual story line, making it confusing, wobbly-paced, and completely destroying the story. Not intense, not scary, not interesting. Save your time and enjoy a good indie thriller or a big-budget film that you've yet to see.

The talented and beautiful Mischa Barton is a good actress well above the usual CW standard. She deserves to make it big on the silver screen. However she seems to be doing a lot of bad b movies recently especially badly written horror movies. This movie was interminable, unpleasant, not very scary and overall a waste of time. Set in a gloomy building set for demolition, Mischa plays a demolition expert sent to assess the building and she encounters an even gloomier cast of characters there. The pace is glacial and the situations are just boring. Cameron Bright of the Twilight sequels isn't quite enough to carry the movie as supporting cast either.

Unfortunately even as a fan of Mischa, it was a struggle to finish this boring dud.

Walled In is the kind of horror film that sets itself up in a bizarre location and then explains all kinds of bizarre rules to make the scariness work. The movie opens with a series of headlines that explain the terrible discovery of 16 bodies cemented into the walls of a building, including that of the architect who designed it. We learn that the person who walled them in, Joseph Malestrazza, was never caught, and then we cut to 15 years later, when the building is planned to be demolished.

Mischa Barton stars as Samantha, a young member of the demolition company family, perfectly named the Walczak's (the 'c' is silent). She recently graduated from engineering school and it becomes her first lone assignment to visit the building and supervise its demolition. It's a perfect set-up for a horror movie, I suppose, although as soon as we get to the building, the one where the 16 bodies were discovered, you remember, and learn that the wife and son of the murdered architect are still living there, the movie takes a pretty serious turn for the worse. I would think that if a man suffered the terrible fate of being murdered and cemented into the walls of a building, his wife would take it upon herself not to raise their son for his entire life in that building. But that's me.

Upon her arrival we meet the woman living there and her creepy son, who explains things to Samantha that the lights go off every six minutes to conserve energy, she shouldn't go to the 8th floor (that's Malestrazza's quarters, you see, and it's never cleaned), and whatever you do don't go on the roof! I would think that someone planning the demolition of a building would explain the logical deficiency of avoiding certain parts of it, but we understand that this is a horror movie and these goofy rules he's explaining are a set-up for freaky sequences that are to follow. There's also the issue of a few remaining people who lived in the building and who are not likely to appreciate Sam arriving to destroy it. The young boy also worries that Malestrazza will be offended by her plans.

I was reminded of the brilliant novel House of Leaves in a lot of things about the movie. Sam discovers enormous discrepancies between the blueprints and the actual measurements of the house, which in that book led to a fascinating and frightening series of events, but in the movie leads to the cheap and utterly witless third act. There is also a lot of throwbacks to Psycho in the relationship between the young boy and his mother in an isolated location. Sam even describes the building as being "like the Bates Motel, only bigger," and at one point the mother forbids her son to go near Sam, telling him that Sa could never take care of him the way she does. Creepy.

Ultimately we learn about an "ancient architectural belief" that provides the reason that Malestrazza killed people and walled them into his buildings (and also the reason why not one of the 27 buildings that Malestrazza built have ever been torn down). It gives the movie the feel of something with more thought in it that it actually has. I felt a little flicker of interest when this was revealed, but in retrospect it strikes me as little more than a screenwriters brainstorm.

I understand that Walled In is based on a novel, and I hope the novel is better than the movie. Books, especially horror books, are always better than the movie, ad if someone read the book and thought it was good enough to make into a film, it must have been better than this movie, because it has all the sign-posts of a weak horror film. It's full to the brim with cheap scares (notice the Screeching Cat Scare, which at least was made a little bit different but essentially is the same old thing, and my favorite, a scary rose scare. You have to see that one to believe it) and blatantly rips off a whole series of other horror movies. I'm curious what the movie would have looked like had director Gilles Paquet-Brenner never seen Psycho, Texas Chainsaw, and the Nightmare on Elm Street films. He even uses that "One, Two, Freddy's Coming For You" song several times. Real creative there, buddy.

I won't go into the details of the end of the film partly because I don't want to ruin it for you but mostly because it's so dumb that I don't want to bother spending my time explaining it. I will tell you one thing though. There's a particularly amusing scene where the boy accuses Samantha of thinking that he's nothing but a "crazy little boy." You gotta see this scene, man, it's hilarious. At the time that he says that to her, I won't tell you what he happens to be doing, but when you make a statement like that, it's generally not a good time to be acting like a crazy little boy.

What follows that scene is a third act that is not entirely without effect, but definitely one of the dumbest situations that I've seen in a horror movie in some years. It is so bizarre and makes so little sense that the movie almost becomes a mystery. Another mystery is why the thing got made in the first place, but sadly, after seeing the movie, I don't think I'm every going to be able to bring myself to read the book

I used to be a very easy grader, till I've seen too many Horror films that simply didn't do the genre justice. So I've found myself rating many films 4 - 6, and too many times unimpressed. In this case, however, I must say I think this film is a little underrated...

The beginning and build up were absolutely fantastic in my book. It's become rare to find this kind of original screen writing, and being the Horror freak that I am I've seen many many horror films. The idea of a killer walling-in his victims? Simply awesome! As the film continued, however, I've found too many aspects resembling Toolbox Murders, although they all changed and became their own ideas towards the ending. Same goes for the twists - I always like playing the guessing game in these kinds of Horror-Thrillers, and I love it when all my guesses are wrong!

I've actually seen many complaints and critics talking about plot-holes and bad screen writing, and I must say I simply don't understand why... have I missed something? There are many aspects on which the film could have improved, but plot-holes? The acting and cinematography have also been just right if you ask me. As for the ending - a little anticlimactic, but that's the main problem in most Horror films of the pas decade or so. Also, the build up is better than the ongoing film, so the great potential could've been lived up to better. Also - the things that bothered me the most - the homage to the Freddie Kruger "One, two..." song. Out of context, out of its league, and simply wrong!

All in all - I liked this film a lot more than Toolbox Murders, and I think it's definitely worth watching. It might not be a masterpiece or one of the best ones, but very few are. In general - never trust the critics, or the reviewers. Always watch and judge for yourself!

I thought this movie had a real intriguing premise, all squandered in a tepid third act. Sam (Mischa Barton) is a freshly graduated demolitions expert, sent on her first job by her family's business. The building she is sent to scout is in the middle of nowhere, constructed by some mad architect a la Thirteen Ghosts. 16 people were "walled in," buried alive with concrete inside the structure of the building. When Sam arrives, there are still some people living there!

It is implied that the building holds many secrets (maybe that was unintentional), most of which go unexplored. We have ONE secret passageway, level 8 is "off limits," being the architect's floor, and, well, a dump. It all looked promising, anyway. Walled In goes completely off the rails at about the 55-minute mark, where it simply becomes a story about obsession. Ok, am I to seriously believe "Jimmy" is capable of pulling off any of these schemes, other than, say, lying or killing his dog? Also, when they show the demolition team drilling, there are more bodies! Why would the police stop looking, and order the crime scene destroyed? A swing and a miss. I'm giving this 5 stars for drawing me in.