TUESDAY, MARCH 25, 2014
The Corridor": Is it a tunnel to the afterlife,
placed in the woods for the unwary?
The Corridor, directed by Evan Kelly and written by
Josh MacDonald, is a Canadian road horror thriller with perhaps an interesting,
even disturbing premise. Unfortunately,
the five young men on this 'bonding' weekend in the Nova Scotia woods don't
measure up to the challenge enough to make you care. And maybe their descent into animal wilding
when challenged by the supernatural is the point.
As the film opens, Tyler Crawley has gone wild; his
mother has been killed (but maybe not by him), and two of his friends are
injured. We don't know what
happened.' But a few months later he gets
out of a mental hospital, well controlled on meds.
Four of his friends invite him on a road trip into the
woods, to a cabin. Indeed the 'Cabin in
the Woods' movie has become another genre, perhaps. They're careful and a bit cautious in how
they talk to him at first. The first
evening, Tyler goes out into the woods, to spread his mother's ashes, and
encounters s supernatural entity that seems like a box of plasma, that can
extend into a corridor. He can step in
and out of it, but he gets a nosebleed.
He then sees his mother's ghost.
When he tells the other guys, they go out the next
morning, and sure enough the entity is back, and bigger. It may have something to do with the
blinking cell phone tower nearby.
After the other men have been exposed by walking
inside the thing, they start going crazy and violent. Tyler, on his meds, remains stable. So it's pretty
obvious how he might have gone crazy.
The guys do horrible things. One man scalps another, to put the rug on the bald man. Guns start getting involved. In time, only Tyler and one other guy is
left.
As the film draws near and end, we see more
pyrotechnics with the entity that gives some idea as to what the entity
is. It can narrow to a thread, providing
a near-death portal, and then extinguish whoever is inside to ashes. Maybe this is what an alien life form could
do.
The implication is that an alien force, with these
monsters composed of electromagnetic fields, could destroy humanity
and turn it back to savagery. But some viewers felt that the other friends
simply lacked purpose and real character and were vulnerable; not everyone
would be/
The concept of the film draws on a number of cinema traditions: Stephen King, not just 'Dreamcatcher' but
also the CBS series 'Under the Dome' (TV, July 11, 2013) the Austrian film 'The
Wall' (Aug. 27, 2013), as well as psychological road movies, ranging from
horror (Bugcrush and 'The House of Adam') to subtle'
personal mystery ('Old Joy'), or even 'Ice Men'.
The distributor is IFC.
I watched the film on Netflix Instant Video. The sound quality was unusually fuzzy.