This is one of those Shudder Originals, and the trailer looked pretty good, so when I saw it come up to watch, the kids and I jumped on it. I enjoy taking time out to watch something new, instead of constantly drooling over movies of yesteryear. I want to stay current and see what all the kiddies are watching.
Director Rebekah McKendry has a decent indie horror resume, consisting of Tales of Halloween (2015) and All the Creatures Were Stirring (2018). Nazariy Demkowicz, Liam Stewart-Kanigan, and Adam Hurtig star, although I am unfamiliar with all three of them. With a 3.9 rating on IMDb, and 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, I probably shouldn’t have wasted my time on this, but I’ll give it a shot.
Matty: “You don’t call 911 on a ghost!”
The synopsis is as follows:
Supernatural horror, based on the eponymous online phenomenon, a ritual conducted in an elevator, in which players attempt to travel to another dimension using a set of rules that can be found online.
I guess I am getting old, because I didn’t know that there was an elevator game. I didn’t realize this was a thing to do on Tik Tok, but apparently, it has gotten so big, it was the main topic of a season 2 episode of the CBS show Evil, entitled “E is for Elevator.”
The movie feels a bit amateur-ish, looking a bit like a cheaply made low budget film, which ironically, is exactly what this is. The acting doesn’t suffer, as these young fresh-faced newbies do a pretty good job in their roles as supernatural investigators. They’re a little bit on the “if I met you in real life, I would probably want to punch you in the face,” side, but that’s the character as written on the page. They’re pretty stereotypical in that we have a minority girl, a minority guy, the nerdy newbie, the hot leather girl, the poorly dressed asshole boss, and the funny guy. The dialogue is snappy, as is the trend nowadays, where they bicker incessantly in their intelligent trendy language to the point of borderline annoying.
There are a few cheap jump scares, some decent atmosphere and production values, but the plot is a little tired. It feels like a throwback to the long-haired Japanese girl phenomenon of the late 90s and early 2000s. The supernatural investigating team has been done a thousand times as well, where some people go to investigate with cameras, not worried about the real-life ramifications, only to get way more than they intended. This time, we get YouTube cliches, like “smash and subscribe,” and shitty sponsors no one has ever heard of.
It’s nowhere near as bad as it’s ratings would suggest, but it isn’t exactly groundbreaking or earth shattering, either. I mean, it’s no Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. And it’s definitely not close to Bloody Mary territory. But overall, it’s a decent enough time killer.
