BEFORE: Just two weeks and two days left in my staycation - I'm trying to stay busy but in some ways, I've run out of things to do at home - I'm eager to rejoin the workforce and start putting in the hours again at an institute of higher learning. They know me there, I've got keys to the building, and I've spent almost two years building up something there. I keep applying for jobs while I'm stuck at home, but this would present a problem if I got accepted somewhere, that would mean I'd have to burn my life down at two jobs just to start something new somewhere else.
I had a stress dream last night where I took a job in a restaurant and I got there early, before the place even opened up, which makes no sense because I'm not really a morning person (but I know I have to be there in two weeks at like 6:30 am, so I see where this came from). In the dream the cook didn't show up so they asked me to step in (a contestant on "Chopped" said this last night, so I also see where THIS comes from...) but the problem was I didn't know any of their recipes and I couldn't understand what the food items were, or how to put them in the pan, so I was suddenly paralyzed and unable to do anything. Then the cook showed up and i was kind of dismissed back to whatever my original job was. I guess the lesson is to just stay in my box, don't make waves or try to be something I'm not, it's only going to lead to trouble.
Nik Dodani carries over from "Strange World". I think this maybe should count as a horror film, but I tried to link it to my October chain, and I just couldn't get that to work. But putting this film (and its sequel) here did seem to work out fine, they're just extending the distance between "The People We Hate at the Wedding" and "Dear Evan Hansen".
THE PLOT: Six strangers find themselves in a maze of deadly mystery rooms and must use their wits to survive.
AFTER: The pastime of escape rooms really caught on in the 2010's - I know this because you never saw the characters on "Seinfeld" go to one, that would have been a situation loaded with comic potential. Why it took until 2019 for somebody to make a sort of horror film based on it is another question - you basically sign a contract that allows a company to kidnap you for a set amount of time, and hold you captive until you solve a few puzzles to get out. And here's the weird part - you pay THEM for the chance to solve their puzzles. Weird, right? Like, I can understand professional crossword solvers or competitive jigsaw puzzlers, because at least there's a chance for them to make money, but why should I pay to solve puzzles? Well, I do have a subscription to one monthly crossword and puzzle magazine, but that's where I draw the line, I've never done this escape room thing.
Perhaps it's just not for the faint of heart - some of us get enough stress as it is just by going to work and answering phones or e-mails or whatever it is that gets done in our offices, and honestly, isn't that stressful enough? Why do some people feel the need to go skiing or surfing or swimming in a shark-infested ocean is also beyond my comprehension - just getting up each day and making it to the next is stressful as it is! I had to get a second job just to take my mind off of how stressful the first one is, and to be able to maybe go somewhere nice on a weekend every few months. Like after a very stressful Comic-Con, I need a week somewhere in BBQ Country or maybe in Vegas just to relax. Why the hell would I spend my spare time trying to get out of a locked room?
But as you may imagine, this film depicts an EXTREME set of escape rooms. Like, deadly ones. And this in no way reflects what actually goes on in the escape room industry, so that sound you hear is people who run escape room experiences all over this country rising up with one voice, screaming at the movie theater screen, saying, "No, no, NO! That's not how escape rooms work, damn it!" We get it guys, you respect the safety of your escape room guests at all times, because if anything bad were to really happen in any escape room in the U.S., that would mean the whole industry would be shut down, or it would get so much bad press that social media would cancel the pastime faster than they shut down circuses. (Hey, remember circuses? Maybe one or two of them didn't treat a lion or elephant well, and the whole shebang got shut down. Now we're all stuck with Cirque du Soleil, thanks a lot.)
This movie shows an extreme example of a bad-acting escape room, one that turns the practice into a deadly game with only one winner among 6 people. At least the last person alive gets $10,000 - but remember that $10K doesn't buy what it once did, so these could be 6 very desperate people. Actually, these particular six people were chosen for a very specific reason, which gets revealed about 2/3 of the way through the film. Now, each one assumed that their friend or boss or college professor bought them the escape room experience because they either need to assert themselves (Zoey) or they did a good job at work (Jason) or the boss wants them to learn social skills (Ben) or they just need to relax (Mike, Amanda). Then there's the super-nerd who's like REALLY into them (Danny).
So once they solve the mystery box puzzle and show up and sign the liability waivers, what could POSSIBLY go wrong? Well, a lot if the theme of the room is "The Hunger Games" and they don't even know their lives are on the line. Maybe the fact that the waiting room turns into a giant broiler over should have been a tip-off. And then the next room looks and feels like a cabin in the Canadian Rockies, like how is that even possible? (In early 2020 I went to a beer dinner held in fake ski cabins in a Manhattan hotel, but really, we were never fooled. There's only so much you can do, after all.)
Then there's the notable "upside-down" room, and every so often a piece of the floor falls out, revealing a 20-story drop - which is only weird because they all entered a Chicago building that was 6 stories tall at most, so what the FREAK is going on here? And how many rooms before there's a way out, other than falling to one's death? And who can even concentrate on solving puzzles when those speakers are blasting Petula Clark's song "Downtown" at full volume? I mean, that's some Guantanamo Bay level of torture right there. You might as well bring on the strobe lights and the electric shocks at that point, because if you keep playing that music, they'll all lose the will to live anyway.
The rooms are also designed to remind THESE six people of past traumas in their lives, which is insane because an Escape Room company wouldn't have the research budget to investigate all of their clients and custom-design the rooms to trigger their PTSD, would they? No, there's that sound again, it's the people who run real escape rooms getting bent out of shape and yelling at the screen. I expect to see a bunch of negative reviews on IMDB from the people who own escape room companies, complaining that this isn't how things work, the one escape room is designed for everyone to use, no way would any company build puzzles designed to trigger just six particular clients...come on, guys, it's a movie, it's fiction. You don't hear people complaining about movies like "Jungle Cruise" or "Haunted Mansion", saying that they're not faithful enough to the Disney park rides, do you?
Apparently there are a bunch of wealthy people watching the action via all the not-so-hidden cameras, and they're betting on who's going to survive. Really, are the reality game shows like "Survivor" and "Big Brother" that much different? I know that "Squid Game" was... I want to say "fictional", but it's just a small jump from "Survivor" to "Squid Game" and then, before you know it, we're televising gladiator competitions as a form of snuff films. So, it could happen, especially if the writers and SAG-AFTRA strike goes on for another six months. During the last big strike they invented shows like "Cops" and "America's Funniest Home Videos" and "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" so maybe this time we'll get "America's Funniest Public Executions" and "Extreme Snuff Films".
"Escape Room" the movie cost only $9 million to make, and then grossed over $155 million overall - even when you factor in marketing costs, that's a huge success. So, naturally, they made a sequel, which played at the AMC Theater where I worked in the summer of 2021. I never got to see it there, I was already planning MY escape from that job, so I'll make up for that tomorrow.
EDIT: It turns out there WAS a case of an escape room being deadly - there was a fire in an escape room in Poland, and five girls died, which affected the release date of this film. But the deaths were accidental, not intentional as seen in the film. Still, best to be careful about these things, I still have no plans to ever play one.
EDIT: It turns out that there WERE three previous films made on this topic, two (perhaps similar) films named "Escape Room" was released in 2017, and another one called "No Escape Room" in 2018. I recommend "Escape Room" (2019), as it seems to have caught on with the public more than the others did. Also note that you can't copyright a film's title, so if you ever want to make a documentary about tornado chasers and call it "Gone With the Wind", you have the legal right to do that. Or I could make a movie about two astronomers competing with each other to make stellar discoveries and call it "Star Wars", why not?
Also starring Taylor Russell, Logan Miller (last seen in "The Bling Ring"), Jay Ellis (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Tyler Labine (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Deborah Ann Woll (last seen in "Ruby Sparks"), Yorick van Wageningen (last seen in "Papillon" (2017)), Cornelius Geaney Jr., Russell Crous, Bart Fouche (last seen in "Monster Hunter"), Paul Hampshire (ditto), Jessica Sutton, Vere Tindale, Kenneth Fok (last seen in "The Dark Tower"), Inge Beckmann (ditto), Jamie-Lee Money, Jeremy Boado (last seen in "Bloodshot"), Rebecca Riedy, Adam Robitel (last seen in "The Rules of Attraction"), Pete Sepenuk (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation"), Mario Tardon (last seen in "The Promise"), Alfredo Tavares (last seen in "Blithe Spirit") with archive footage of Pat Morita.
RATING: 6 out of 10 pressure plates
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