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Escape Room
Score: 72%
Rating: R
Publisher: Lionsgate Home Entertainment
Region: 1
Media: DVD/1
Running Time: 81 Mins.
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Audio: English 5.1 Dolby Digital
Subtitles: English, Spanish

Features:
  • Director's Commentary
  • Deleted Scenes
  • Bloopers

Escape Room takes a growing market in the entertainment industry and asks what would happen if a sadistic person designed one for murder and punishment and lured people into his twisted game. For one, he shouldn't expect much in the way of repeat business, but given what he apparently charges for this night of "fun," that might not be too much of a problem.

It's Tyler's (Evan Williams, Degrassi: The Next Generation, Versailles) 30th birthday and his girlfriend, Christen (Elisabeth Hower) has bought six tickets to an exclusive, underground escape room. She and Tyler are going to be accompanied by Tyler's sister, Tabby (Kelly Delson); Tabby's boyfriend, Conrad (John Ierardi) and another couple, Natasha (Annabelle Stephenson) and her husband Anderson (Dan J. Johnson). As soon as the six leave the restaurant and get picked up by a black luxury van, the game begins and they have only a limited amount of time to get out.

When they remove their blindfolds, the characters find themselves separated in different rooms. Tabby and Conrad appear to be in a doctor's office, Natasha and Anderson are in a study, while Tyler is alone in a room filled with TVs, newspapers and clocks. While the five people start to work out exactly what they are dealing with, they also slowly come together as they discover just how their rooms are connected. When one of the TVs comes alive and it shows Christen trapped in a cage and naked, Tyler starts to worry that this might not just be a game, and when his friends start to die, that fact becomes painfully obvious.

Now the race against time for what was supposed to be an amusing evening becomes a test of wills, cleverness, and ingenuity as the friends work their way through more and more insidiously tricky puzzles, but the question remains, who is behind this escape room and why are they being tortured?

Escape Room has a lot of potential, and it's clear that there is a lot of influence from the Saw series, but by the end of the film, there are still enough open questions and confusion about the motives behind everything that just left us with a cold feeling towards the movie as a whole. While the puzzles themselves were interesting, the characters, story, and overall feel just left something to be desired, and even the scant extra features did little to make this DVD worth buying. If you are looking for a horror movie to watch and have run out of other recommendations, then give Escape Room a viewing, but don't expect too much.



-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications
AKA Chris Meyer
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