Catacombs (2007)

Director: Tomm Coker / David Elliot

Starring: Shannyn Sossamon, Alecia Moore

Run Time: 88 mins

Certificate: 18

 

Plot Outline: Whilst visiting her sister in Paris, Victoria visits the city's infamous catacombs where the underground rave scene is going strong. In the 200-mile strong labyrinth of tunnels lined by the skeletal remains of millions of people buried there, Victoria becomes separated from the rave and becomes lost. Soon she believes that someone or something is following her around in the dark. Or is it just her imagination playing tricks on her?

The Review: If there's nothing better in a horror film than a creepy setting, it's a creepy setting from real life. And in Catacombs, you've got arguably one of the creepiest real life settings to base a horror film in. The French ran out of room to bury their dead in the late 18th Century and so began burying them in the old stone mines beneath the city, turning death into literal works of art. I've been to the underground vaults in Edinburgh and it was a bit surreal. So imagine what it must be like to be in the catacombs of Paris with huge walls of human bones staring at you. If there's nothing worse in a horror film, it's for it to blow away such a great setting with terrible execution. Catacombs makes such a mistake.

Being stranded in the catacombs and in the dark is all well and good if something was actually made of that fact. However the writers of Catacombs (coincidentally the directors as well) just doesn't use the setting to it's advantage. No atmosphere is created for a setting that oozes atmosphere just by thinking about it. The damn thing is too dark half of the time and the main character suffers a few blackouts, which means the screen fades to black even more. The lighting is really bad and mainly consists of flashlights and the odd flare here and there. This takes away any visual impact that the film may have had. Other films have relied on shadows and shapes in dimly-lit settings to create a sense that there's something else there but without "clues" and pointers, there's no way of knowing if anything is there with her. I mean the dark scares us all to a degree and being lost in the dark in a maze is something not one of us would really want to do, especially one filled with human bones and true history. But staring at a black picture and listening to people screaming soon gets annoying. The film moves pretty quickly to begin with so it's not long before the rave is happening and Victoria is separated from it which leads to the main part of the film. And now that the character has been separated from the rest of the world, it's time to unleash hell. Only not quite. Nothing is unleashed. No mad monster is let loose. The character just runs around in the dark. There's no action. There's little chasing. There's little excitement. There's little anything. Just the same thing over and over again. It seems to be padding the film out as much as it can before the finale. A film that needs as much padding as this should never have been given the green light. It could have worked as a short story but not as a main feature. It's little wonder to find it had a chequered history with cinematic releases, being free-to-air on the web site and eventually finding a home on DVD.