bozabozidar

Anthology of three extremely low-budget short films with the fourth serving as a framing device. It's one thing to make a B-movie that has limited resources such as not being afford to hire extras or only having one location for filming, but all of these shorts are the cheapest amateur garbage, looking like they were filmed entirely with the cheapest phone cameras and having abysmal editing, with audio being so out of place at times that I wondered if there's something wrong with my speakers.

The first short is the simplest most straightforward story about home invasion, completely forgettable and could've been 5 minutes long.

The second one is a dark comedy resembling Gremlins, but it's main problem is that despite revolving around a fantastical creature, the special effects are literally nonexistent. It mostly consists out of actors pretending to be haunted and killed by a scary off-screen creature, but it's just so badly filmed, it's obvious there's no creature whatsoever because the production couldn't even afford even a good prop, instead only showing a few glimpses of a plastic toy near the end.

The third short rips off Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but with way more cannibals. Again, everything is very amateurish, but what I found quite distracting is how a few shots were filmed with a camera that's of considerably higher quality than anything else used in this garbage anthology, so it's distracting how the image gets much clearer and better for just a few seconds here and there.

Finally, I think that the framing story actually had the most potential, since it's the only one that actually has an unpredictable plot twist. However, once again the special effects are nonexistent, and the surprise ending literally looks like just some rough raw footage that should have been heavily edited with some CGI added in, but it's obvious they couldn't afford any of that.

This is a direct sequel to the surprisingly successful 2019 movie (which I personally liked), so you should really watch that one first if you haven't already. However, the 2nd Escape Room is shorter and has a much faster pacing than the first one, but most importantly everything is just so chaotic and messy all around. The first Room in the original movie was one of the movie's best scenes, as it slowly built up the atmosphere and gave both the characters and the audience enough time to think, whereas the first "Room" in this one is just ridiculous, with everything happening way too quickly and all the characters screaming in such an annoying way. Also, all the deaths are absurdly elaborate, involving some fantastical contraptions that look like they came out of an unusually stupid episode of the original Star Trek series; but this was probably done because more realistic and explicit death scenes would restrict the film's access to younger audiences. Anyhow, the whole movie is pretty much just a set up for the final plot twist, and without spoiling anything I'll just say that the twist is just preposterously unexpected and will leave many viewers scratching their heads out of bafflement as it just raises many new questions. I would recommend the "Tournament" only to those fans of the original who don't have high expectations from the sequel.