Four spoiled, entitled, prep school kids decide to throw the party of the millennium in an old, sealed World War II bunker hidden on school grounds. As is usually the case with such plans, especially if the plans are made in the context of a horror movie, things go horribly awry and as the film opens we see Thora Birch, sporting a forehead large enough to play racquetball on, stumbling down the corridors of her school bloody and battered.
After given much-needed medical attention, Birch meets with the school shrink and begins to spin a tale of innocent high jinx (e.g., playing flashlight tag), giving way to abject terror. Birch’s account of what happened, told in flashbacks, suggests that her best friend, Martin, who aided in the engineering of the event, locked the quartet in the bunker because he was jealous over Birch’s crush on one of the jocks at the party. Eventually Martin came to his senses and let them all out. Wait, what? As the shrink tells one of her colleagues in a phone call, Birch is clearly delusional/traumatized and is repressing the true events of the tragedy, which ended in death for her 3 friends. As the truth about what really occurred in the bunker emerges, again told in flashbacks, we question everything we learned about Birch during the first half of the movie. Is she as innocent as we initially believe or is there some sociopathy fueling her motives?
I picked this film up at a collectible show a few years ago and was instantly riveted (apparently The Hole was shelved and never released theatrically although it finally went direct-to-video recently). I love films that tell the same story from 2 different perspectives (e.g., Audrey Tautou’s “À la folie... pas du tout (2002)”) and this one delivers. All performances are terrific, especially Birch’s, whose role required some fairly complicated psychological nuances. Director Nick Hamm achieves an eerie claustrophobic feel to the bunker by slowly turning down the lights over the course of the film as things go from fun to terrifying. The true events of what happened in the bunker are greatly disturbing and surprising.
The Hole is notable for one other reason. Keira Knightley of Pirates of the Caribbean fame briefly goes topless. Don’t believe me?
Why not watch the trailer?
the hole
3 comments:
Jeez, I put out the call to talk about the skin factor and the next day we've got Keira Knightly flashing us? I've created a monster.
Awesome! I created a monster. I've always wanted to.
It's amazing what constitutes fun when you're in high school. Any setting devoid of authority figures is desirable, including a musty, decades-old death trap.
dude, your monster rules! whenever i want to create a monster, i have to put vampire teeth on a kid and then severely beat him for a few months.
Gentlemen, this just in!
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Horror-film fans with a taste for '70s-style slasher antics can indulge themselves next week when the original Halloween movie returns to theaters for the first time in 27 years.
A digitally remastered, high-definition version of the 1978 film, which turned Jamie Lee Curtis into a star, will play at 8 p.m. Oct. 30 and 31 in 150 movie houses.
A new 20-minute featurette about Halloween, including interviews with original cast members and a look at the movie's impact on pop culture, will precede the screening.
Halloween, which spurred a spate of multi-sequel slasher films, tells the story of an escapee from a mental institution, Michael Myers, who goes on a murderous spree on Halloween night.
Seven sequels have followed. The eighth is on the way, to be written and directed by aptly named rocker Rob Zombie. Halloween 9 is slated for release on Oct. 19, 2007.
"I take the original film very seriously, and I want to make it terrifying again," said Zombie.
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