The Corridor

Otherwise you might start watching The Corridor. The front cover looks genuinely well-made, with a real creepy atmosphere. How wrong it can be. Despite the intriguing visual art, the film is pretty dull.

It plays out like Stephen King's 'Dreamcatcher,' only not as good (and Dreamcatcher was pretty maligned!). Four (or was if five?) friends go to a mountain cabin to bond (or something, it doesn't really matter). There, one of them starts finding a wibbly-wobbly area of the surrounding woods that looks nothing like a corridor, yet that's what they call it. This wibbly-wobbly bit gives them all nosebleeds. Carnage follows.

However, what little carnage there is (and one particularly impressive gore scene) comes woefully too late. The characters are simply too dull to care about, which is a shame, as the actors do a decent job of portraying them (if you can excuse the worst 'bald' man's head ever to hit the screen).

The acting is not the problem, it's just the flow. The first two thirds are basically the guys sitting around discussing their problems. Most people will have already condemned the film before it kicks off. Then, when it finally gets going, you may enjoy the final third, but it's a hell of a long road to travel just for the pay-off.

If you liked Dreamcatcher, stick to it. If you didn't, you probably won't like this either!

The Corridor is an interesting film as horror films go. Even as a small film it is undeniable that it is a creature of ambitious efforts. Fortunately, these efforts pay off to the tune of delivering the audience a disturbing and rare portrayal of what happens when the extraordinary brings out the unusual and ultimately the worst in a group of friends whose circle is dangerously close to splintering from very real pressures of the earthly kind.

The Corridor follows 5 men whose boyhood friendships have persisted into adulthood and who individually are still struggling to find their places in the grown-up world. Their roles are further questioned when a member of the group, Tyler (Stephen Chambers), loses his mother under suspicious circumstances that leaves Chris (David Patrick Fleming) injured and questioning the sanity of his life-long friend.

In an effort to reconnect and help Tyler in the emotionally grueling process of laying his mother's ashes to rest, the 5 men decide to plan a boys' retreat to the cabin they spent so much time in in their youths. Tyler, grappling with his dementia (an aftershock of the ordeal with his mother) makes a discovery in the woods that will threaten the sanity and the lives of the rest of the group.

The real terror in The Corridor is more subversive than the obvious antagonist and the depth of the film's themes skirt on the edges of such cult favorites as Fight Club, Donnie Darko and some of Lynch's more surreal efforts. The threat isn't so much the enigmatic force in the woods as it is the enigma that is silently killing the group from the inside: Who are you when you lack purpose? How do we define ourselves in a world that denies us definition? It is the the corridor itself that empowers the group and seems only to magnify their own personal problems into full blown psychosis.

Although this might seem a little heady for the casual watcher, TC speaks to those of us who saw our role models revealed as villains, saw our fathers too humanized to remain out heroes and ultimately left us in a world without warrior poets looking forward to jobs we despise and positions in life that rarely treat us with any real moments of fulfillment. It is this alarmingly emotional character study of the group that elevates the Corridor to a film that actually surpasses its intent. For the horror fan The Corridor delivers some truly disturbing scenes of torture and madness driven degradation that sticks with you long after the credits begin to roll. It is in these moments that we see a group of actors that have struck their rhythm and deliver on all levels of the script, from the intense loss and longing to the stark insanity that characterizes the latter half of the picture. Director Evan Kelly has hit the ground running and I for one am eagerly looking forward to his next effort.

Highly recommended.

I can't think of the last time I saw anything this bizarre. The script must surely have been written by a genuine schizophrenic - parts of it are too idiosyncratic to be anything other than autobiographical and other parts of it are too strange to have any meaning beyond the context to the author's own delusions. There must be an endless number of scripts out there that are equally weird, produced daily by schizophrenics in mental hospitals all over the world. Here is one however, that someone decided to straight up make into a movie. I mean I don't know that this was the case but that's certainly what it appears to be.

There are however some genuinely scary moments amongst the bad acting and contrived scenes. For example - when the mother starts doing sign language on a loop on the video. The best bits of this movie (and they were very few) reminded me of "the Atrocity Exhibition". Check it out if you like unmitigated weirdness.

Well, definitely liked the way that this movie started out. It had a bit of mystery with a kid psyching out, and with the illusion of a possible crime being committed. But, the film had a lot of slow moments to it, especially right after the first five minutes. It dragged a bit to long at times, and it bored me quickly. Once all of the friends got together out in the country, I felt like the characters were disjointed and acted more like they just met, rather than supposedly being best friends since high school. Fast forward to about the last 30 minutes of the film. This is where it just seemed a bit odd to me, and I didn't particularly like that portion of it. I felt that I knew where they were trying to go with it, but to me, it didn't quite get there. I could definitely identify with the "crazy" character, but again, what was reality and what wasn't? I don't know if parts of the film was supposed to be some sort of reconciliation, or was it mere punishment. I didn't hate the movie, but I didn't quite like it either.

First off, once I realized the opening music was by the Great Lake Swimmers, I realized I was watching a Canadian flick and very keen. Overall I was not disappointed. Acting was fair to good for the most part. The story itself was somewhat unique and each character had sufficient personal baggage to keep things interesting.

Here are my pros/cons

Pros: not your typical story, Setting was excellent (nothing like a real snowy landscape to add an air of realism), Dialogue for the most part was well written, nice little scare scene when watching the video tape, Some not anticipated brutality

Cons; confusing ending, possibly meant to be that way, The jock's balding scalp. Come on, this was ridiculous. When we first see him about to come out of his house I actually truly thought he was wearing a cheap Halloween fake bald head. I thought maybe it was a joke, but evidently not. It is hands down the worst make up blunder I've seen, quite obvious this guy had a full head of hair.

So, playing off the Great Lake Swimmers soundtrack against the worst fake bald head ever, I give this movie a 5.