Film Brain reviews a horror film set underground, that largely plays out in real time as a continuous shot with just two actors. Gee, you got enough limitations there? No wonder it feels so limited.
00:00Let's dig deep into Scurry, an underground horror movie that stages a single continuous shot.
00:05Jamie Costa awakens in a sinkhole caused by monsters who have emerged from under the ground and are attacking the surface.
00:12He soon finds Amalia, who is also seriously injured, and together they must go deeper underground to find a way out and evade the creatures around them.
00:21Scurry is from Australian director Luke Spark, who has held movies like The Occupation series and the recent Dinos in Vietnam flick Primitive War, which are quite ambitious for low-budget genre films.
00:33Here the gimmick is having the entire thing play out in real time, but unfortunately the gimmick is largely where the ambition ends.
00:39The opening moments of Scurry do show some promise with an elaborate camera move from a skyscraper to a street to below it,
00:47where Costa spends the first few minutes with his arm pinned, like in 127 hours.
00:52I know this was obviously made on an extremely tight budget, but the fact that it's playing out in a very tight location with limited lighting,
00:59just two actors and as a single shot is putting on so many limitations, there's hardly enough for a movie at all.
01:06Well, I say a single shot because it very clearly isn't, with some quite conspicuous camera pans or total darkness to try and hide the joins, which are quite distracting.
01:16That might not have been a problem if, you know, it was actually tense and claustrophobic, but it isn't,
01:22especially because we hardly see any of the arachnid monsters most of the time,
01:26with the camera even infuriatingly panning away from them in what are supposed to be the attack scenes to hide the budget and some dodgy effects.
01:34Aside from some clever stuff with a night vision camcorder, this is trying to mash up A Quiet Place and The Descent,
01:40but without the ingenuity or particularly the sound design of either.
01:44About 60% of this is just the actors heavily breathing in a hole lit only by a lighter,
01:49but you'll be glad when they aren't speaking because the character writing is terrible.
01:54The two lead to giving this antagonistic relationship for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than just empty dramatic tension,
02:00and Amaya's character is so hostile, she threatens him with a gun several times.
02:06Why?
02:07There's so little going on, the plot information is drip-fed excruciatingly slowly.
02:13It takes us 70 minutes to find out what the female main character's name is.
02:17The exceptions are the bits where the characters stop to deliver these lengthy and clumsy backstory monologues
02:23to just halt the movie dead, and you still don't care about either of them.
02:28The ending, when it finally arrives, is so ludicrously drawn out over the space of 20 minutes or so,
02:34they'll likely test the patience of whatever audience hasn't quit yet.
02:37This is such a thin drool that it barely even has enough to sustain a short film,
02:42but to drag this out to 100 minutes is almost agonizingly boring.
Be the first to comment