Long time readers will have probably picked up on my verdant disdain for the horrible cretinous mass that is people. Individuals can be great; some individuals in fact I would go as far as to I say I quite like. People as a group however are just the worst. Now I've made the mistake of arguing with stupid on the internet before and I've cut it way down nowadays because I just don't find it fulfilling any longer. People it would seem, when gathered together (physically or intellectually, however loosely you use the latter), are just plain stupid. They say stupid things, they do stupid things and they use stupid excuses to justify their own inane stupidity. Stupidity likes to simultaneously stay topical whilst trotting out the same tired and stupid arguments; to whit there are people trying to blame COVID 19 on 5G broadband, possibly on 4G enabled devices (you know the ones they complained about when 4G rolled out). Long and short of it; if you're trying to crowbar in some sort of correlation between 5G and COVID 19 you're going to make yourself look like an idiot.
Speaking of regurgitating tropes like so much half digested breakfast trying to stay culturally relevant, I watched Escape Room the other day out of a heady mix of boredom and more boredom so let's dig in, shall we?
Escape Rooms have been a thing for a few years now and predictably enough, I've managed to avoid actually going in one for fear of having what normal humans call fun. I'm sure those who frequent these dusty little ramshackle rooms filled with esoteric trivial puzzling will tell me I'm missing out, but the number of shits I give is roughly equal to zero, assuming you take my meaning of roughly to be 'exactly'. It was only a matter of time of course, until somebody pumped money into a script based around the fairly simply premise of "what would happen if an escape room had been designed to murder it's occupants if they don't complete the set challenges. Like Saw I guess. Oh wait, yeah they did this already in Saw.
Ironically this is the second escape room move to arrive in the space of a year, which either means directors were slow on the uptake or it takes 5 years to fund and film a crappy horror these days. I've watched both; one was a straight to Netflix slab of completely unmemorable toss so dire, I've got no clue as to what happens. This slightly more recent and significantly higher budget affair may have actually got a cinema release albeit probably a tiny little one. The trailer was half decent and I'm a sucker for Saw and it's ilk so why not throw that £7 around like Monopoly money right? Make it rain I say! (a short showery spell of low denomination coins, followed by prolonged periods of doubt and ultimately disappointment. Highs of 13 degrees).
You're unlikely to watch this of your own volition, but without spoilers you've already experienced all of the blatant cliches, tropes and story beats like the writers just wrote them all down whilst watching other films and drew them at random out of a hat:
The Selection Box.
Rather than a delicious mix of individually wrapped confection for them to horde and argue with their families over why they keep putting coffee ones in when nobody likes them, a group of seemingly random strangers receive a puzzle box through the mail ostensibly from a loved one or colleague. First of all, I've seen Hellraiser enough times to know that you don't screw around with random puzzle boxes. Secondly, if someone sends me a surprise gift, I'd at least text them to say thanks; at which point in this movie they'd say "what surprise puzzle box gift, stop being weird" and that would be that puzzle box in the bin. 3rd, assuming all of those other things conveniently line up, the likelihood of me being able open the damn thing on time is slim, the chance of me attending the actual room after that is exactly zero.
The Convenient Skill Sets:
I don't know how they manage to find all these diverse victims who all have enough in common to make the more sloth-like brains in the audience gasp when that big reveal comes in. Maybe in America it's super easy to find 7 people who have all shared a similarly exploitable traumatic experience with a farmyard animal or just all happened to shop at the same 7 eleven on the wrong day, who knows? They all have abilities that perfectly compliment each other, which ordinarily you might have though would make them more likely to succeed. Brilliant mathematician, rugged survivalist, escape room veteran, hopeless slacker with no redeeming qualities other than his expendability; the gang's all here.
The Puzzles/Traps/Rooms
Whatever you want to call these intricate methods of arbitrary execution, it's all just the same tedious crap. Escape rooms seem to be designed specifically to be full of unhelpful shit to mask the real solutions, but somehow our victims just keep getting it right just in time to get to the next room but not in time to save everyone, because what's the point in all this over elaborate trickery if they either don't solve the first room and die clutching at straws, or they work it all out and move through unscathed? "Look, it's a giant sliding puzzle!" one of them shouts. Great. Those things take me forever. Make peace with your makers folks, we're all toast.
Plot tweeeest!
Of course there's a twist, although if you didn't see this one coming a country mile off then I suspect you were indulging in something other than paying attention, not that I blame you. Shadowy cabal that has too much information on everyone? Rigged rooms in a rigged game? Set-up for a sequel? Nobody believes the survivors when they try to tell police? Terrible anagrams? False intros? False endings? You name the trope, it's probably in here.
Look, I'm not necessarily dissing Escape Rooms as an event or experience or whatever they're classed as. If that's your bag, then that's your bag. I'm sure many of you have group photos taken with signs that read "I solved the Medieval Room by plunging my hand into boiling oil to find the magical gourd" or " We failed because the idiot next to me can't tell time on an analogue clock and doesn't yet know where left is" or whatever pseudo-charming bullshit they foist onto you after taking your hard earned cash to lock you in a dusty room for an hour. That's fine, it takes all kinds. It may make for a relatively enjoyable diversion from the harsh realities of life for sixty increasingly panicked minutes, but sadly it doesn't make for a decent 90 minute horror flick.
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