Badmovies.org Forum

Last night I watched Subterano (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0255623/)  A low budget sci-fi/horror flick from Australia.


The premise of the movie is that 11 or so randomly selected people are trapped in an underground parking garage in a scenario that mimmicks a virtual reality game. The players are slowlyy being killed off by VR aspects of the game come to life that are being contolled by...someone.

For some reason, the movie was fairly entertaining and kept me interested throughout.  The pacing was good, some of the characters were fairly interesting, the mood was pretty good.  However, in retrospect..I think the reason it kep my interest was that I was waiting to see how how issues resolved....

The budget was obviously pretty low.  Much of the movie was shot in a parking garage and the effects are almost all CG, but they blen wll with the live action and given the VR nature of the threat, they come across well.

It is a bit violent in a few places and I almost couldn't help thinking that if the had toned down the violence and the language, this would have made a decent PG-13

*SPOILERS*
However, in the end, it let me down.  There are some simularities to CUBE but in CUBE, there is a bit of a rhyme/reason to why the characters are there.  Here, it looks like this will be the case as well.  The two main characters are revolutionaries and in the group is a minor security person who takes herself too seriously and an old man just fired from his job (both from the company that designed the VR game they are now stuck in).   Since the two revolutionaries are fghting against the fascist futuristic government, I assumed that his would tie into why they were there and who was running the show.  The security person is a loyal follower of the regime and there is some nice conflict between her and the two revolutionaries, but it never really goes anywhere.  I think the movie held me sol long because I was expecting a reason for all these people to be together, but in the end, they were just randomly chosen by the son of the game's designer for some vicious thrills and a lot of subplots that could've been pretty interesting never get played out.