Trapped Alive

I first saw this in the late 90s on a vhs. Revisited it recently aft reading Ba_harrison's hilarious review. This movie is indeed unintentionally funny. The old geezer's/monster's white hair, the girl's out dated undergarments, the end speech and Mongo's face n guts. On a snowy Christmas nite, three convicts break outta prison n they carjack taking two women as hostages but things turn ugly when the car plummets down a mine shaft, trapping all the five fellas down. Well, like they say outta the frying pan into the fire. Unknown to em, an ol Alexander Pearce with snowy hair has been inhabiting the mine. The film lacks tension n the twist is very predictable. The kills r very few n nothing gory, except for the offscreen one. I thot that Mongo the Rubeus Hagrid lookalike will put up some fight man. Cameron Mitchell is totally wasted.

I give this film a 7 only as an enjoyably bad movie - so it gets that score for being cheesy and fun. To its credit, you never know what is going to happen next - it seems like five screenplays were thrown into a blender and they filmed that. Escaped prisoners, two innocent girls driving home late at night, abandoned mines, sleazy cops, cannibal miners, a little gore, ta-da! We laughed and enjoyed how bad it was. Everything you would want in a 80's horror/action movie. Veteran actor Cameron Mitchell (who was on Broadway in the original cast of Death Of A Salesman and then became an International B-movie actor) plays a worried father of one of the kidnapped girls but he's hardly in it. He must of had a mortgage payment due. Check out this bizarre cheesefest. You Will Be Trapped & Entertained!

The most frustrating thing about this film is that it had all the right pieces to be so much better. A creepy abandoned mine setting, a deformed cannibal hunting unsuspecting victims... but we end up with maybe five minutes of that promised premise at the most, with the film wasting 95% of its run time on multiple storylines of unrelated, unentertaining drama. It could have been up there as a classic, memorable slasher, had it done away with all the unnecessary filler in favour of bloody kills and more cannibal action, but unfortunately we're just left with a brief taste of what could have been in the end. The acting and production value are decent enough at least, but those things are wasted on a film as boring as this.

It's fair to say that a lot of dross was made in the 1980s and TRAPPED ALIVE (aka TRAPPED) is a good example of this. It's a cheesy, low budget piece of nonsense that attempts to combine the thriller and horror genres but does neither successfully. The plot is the most interesting thing in it but even that's mishandled, leaving this a near unwatchable viewing experience.

The film sat on the shelf for five years before release which gives you some idea of the quality. The story sees some violent criminals bust out of prison and take some young people hostage. The local police department are in hot pursuit, but all of the characters end up being trapped in an abandoned mine where they're pursued by a cannibalistic killer.

It's predictable stuff indeed and feels so slapdash that it's impossible to enjoy. The early scene-staging stuff is quite dull but when the action shifts to the mine things get really dark (visually) so you can't figure out what's happening. There's some gloopy gore here and a lot of bad acting from the cast, including Cameron Mitchell in one of his '80s-era anything-goes B-movies. The killer is a visual disappointment looking just like an old man and there's no bang here, just fizz.

The 80s have spawned countless low-budget slashers, and many of them are so terrible that you wonder how anyone even considered investing money in them. When you then bump into a late 80s slasher that apparently remained on the shelf until the 90s before it was released, you are even more wary. Is this slasher so disastrous that producers thought it was too bad to release even in the 80s?

"Trapped Alive" is one of them, but I can immediately reassure everyone: it is not worse than your average 80s slasher, and certainly not after the splendid restoration for BluRay. Of course, it's not good, either. The plot is about two beautiful young ladies who want to go out on Christmas Eve but are taken hostage by three escaped and very dangerous convicts. By avoiding a roadblock, they get stuck in an old abandoned mine, which turns out to be inhabited by a bewildered and cannibalistic monstrosity Talk about bad luck, right?

The script is full of annoying clichés. One of the gangsters - a pretty boy - is actually kind-hearted, the owner of the mine is all too aware of the presence of the creature, the inevitable Stockholm syndrome plot twist, etc. Of course, it also takes way too long before we get to see the monster, BUT ... He is worth the wait! "Trapped Alive" contains quite a bit of unsavory gore and a few wonderfully absurd dialogues. To make the film a bit more appealing, there's a touch of nudity, and the presence of genre veteran Cameron Mitchell (although his scenes are the dullest and most redundant ones). Certainly not mandatory viewing, but worthwhile for slasher fans.