No Escape Room (2018)

Decent watch, probably won't watch again, but can recommend if you're looking for another "escape room movie". This is a weird movie, just what it is. I'm down with the premise and I went in thinking it was going to be a "House of 1000 Corpses" version of "Escape Room", and it's really neither. It's closer to "Amityville Horror", "1408", or "Thirteen Ghosts" with an escape room element (but not nearly as good) than either of those movies. I also went in thinking Jeni Ross was Debbi Ryan ("Insatiable"), of whom I'm not a big fan, but has proven she can carry a movie. Jeni Ross does a great job here, showing a lot of range and is very expressive. The rest of the cast is acceptable, if forgettable. This is a classic symptom of random and sudden deaths in characters in poor productions: the studio doesn't want to invest in a character just to kill them off, but they forget that the audience is the one that needs to be invested in the character for its death to mean anything, so the kills are a little disappointing in this. There is good in this movie, and fans of the genres it shares: escape rooms, haunted house, and time loops will have some fun. It just tries to be too much ending as too little.

Watched this with friends. Thankfully this was not my pick. Though this was not a bad movie it wasn't the greatest either. It starts out really well but then you start to rake up questions and theories throughout only for the ending to give you no answers on your questions or theories. This starts out with a father (Michael) and daughter (Karen) going out for the weekend to bond but they run into car trouble and are stranded. Instead of taking this as a loss they decide to do an escape room and thats where they meet the other characters in the movie. **Tyler** (who is on his phone the whole) and **Melanie** (Tyler's Gf) who are here because its Melanie's birthday and she likes escape room. **Andrew** who is basically there because apparently his therapist told him to interact with more people. **Josie** is the host of the Escape room and the **inventor** is apparently the man that built the mansion for some reasons .... This is basically all you find out about the characters. You are given no backstory and no history. You see no character development and no character relationships being built or getting stronger. There is this weird attraction/tension between Andrew and Karen which is totally weird since she's in high school and he's clearly been out of HS for a while. The acting isn't great but I honesty don't think that its the actors fault. I think its the script. The script could have been so much better. There was great ideas (like Melanie's phone call, the painting, the morgue and the time loops) but nothing is explained or connected in a way to make this good. It just felt like random scenes and ideas put together but nothing to tie them together. I was waiting for the ending to make it all make sense (those are my favorite types of movies or shows) and in the end nothing made sense. There was also a couple of great scare scenes too. Effects in the movie were also good. Overall, this was an okay watch. If you need a movie that requires minimal brain activity and a couple of scary scenes then you can get enjoyment out of this. If you don't go in with great expectations then it will be a great watch. Just remember you will get no answers so be prepared for confusion.