Walled In

I thought this movie had a real intriguing premise, all squandered in a tepid third act. Sam (Mischa Barton) is a freshly graduated demolitions expert, sent on her first job by her family's business. The building she is sent to scout is in the middle of nowhere, constructed by some mad architect a la Thirteen Ghosts. 16 people were "walled in," buried alive with concrete inside the structure of the building. When Sam arrives, there are still some people living there!

It is implied that the building holds many secrets (maybe that was unintentional), most of which go unexplored. We have ONE secret passageway, level 8 is "off limits," being the architect's floor, and, well, a dump. It all looked promising, anyway. Walled In goes completely off the rails at about the 55-minute mark, where it simply becomes a story about obsession. Ok, am I to seriously believe "Jimmy" is capable of pulling off any of these schemes, other than, say, lying or killing his dog? Also, when they show the demolition team drilling, there are more bodies! Why would the police stop looking, and order the crime scene destroyed? A swing and a miss. I'm giving this 5 stars for drawing me in.

Samantha Walczak (Mischa Barton) is the first Walczak to graduate college, and follows the family tradition of demolition, despite her love of architecture. She is sent on her first assignment to a building from an eccentric architect, Joseph Malestrazza, who cemented the bodies of people into his walls, including himself. This allegedly gives the building immortality, which is a bit of a problem when you're in charge of demolishing it. In the battle between demolition expert and spiritual architecture, who can win?

I watched this film, and found myself let down after the first ten minutes. I enjoyed the opening scene with a young girl becoming part of the building -- more scenes like this would have sold the film -- and the credits over newspaper articles detailing horrific murders tied to the building. But the remainder of the film just flopped and dragged like a captured fish out of water, and to say what I would say and say it better, I defer to the reviews of Michael DeZubiria and Horror.Com's Staci Layne Wilson. (I am reluctant to encourage readers to venture from Killer Reviews, but these are excellent writers.)

Wilson touches on all the right allusions, hinting that "Walled In" has aspects of Argento, Poe, Roeg, Polanski and Cocteau -- names you don't just throw around. DeZubiria compares the story in some respects to Mark Z. Danielewski's unique 2000 novel "House of Leaves". But Wilson is right when she says the directing "plays it safe" and falls short of all these looming figures, and the accompanying cinematography is "not very innovative", which is unfortunate for a film set in a building as interestingly bizarre as this one. DeZubiria flatly states that "Walled In" "blatantly rips off a whole series of other horror movies".

Wilson and DeZubiria both find the film discourages, rather than encourages, reading of the original book -- Serge Brussolo's novel "Les Emmeures". Wilson says "the movie quelled my curiosity" and DeZubiria bluntly says the book "must have been better than this movie" but "I don't think I'm ever going to be able to bring myself to read the book". As I found the plot to be largely a rehashing of "Thirteen Ghosts", and the storyline as given in the film to be boring, I have to concur -- the book is likely better than the film, but doesn't seem worth my time to seek out.

DeZubiria doesn't reveal the end, but says it's "so dumb that I don't want to bother spending my time explaining it", and that's a fair assessment. I seriously had a difficult time sitting through half the movie, it was a bit of cinematic torture to make it to the end. The "making of" featurette doesn't help or add any value to the DVD. Wilson rightly says it's nothing more than back-patting. If you want to see the cast and crew congratulate themselves on a boring movie, be my guest. But I think these two reviewers got it right -- there are many other authors and directors who deserve to have their films appreciated. Read and watch those novels and films, and leave this one to be quickly forgotten in your local video store's discount bin.

The talented and beautiful Mischa Barton is a good actress well above the usual CW standard. She deserves to make it big on the silver screen. However she seems to be doing a lot of bad b movies recently especially badly written horror movies. This movie was interminable, unpleasant, not very scary and overall a waste of time. Set in a gloomy building set for demolition, Mischa plays a demolition expert sent to assess the building and she encounters an even gloomier cast of characters there. The pace is glacial and the situations are just boring. Cameron Bright of the Twilight sequels isn't quite enough to carry the movie as supporting cast either.

Unfortunately even as a fan of Mischa, it was a struggle to finish this boring dud.

I had high hopes for this movie after seeing the trailer. This could have been a good movie, but... The production team seemed to have run out of money, and then had to wrap it up really fast half way through, causing a hasty and staggering series of quick shots with "one-take" scenes. This, obviously, made the actors look bad and that's a shame. They did a good job at the beginning of the film. The first 20-30 minutes of the movie is actually pretty good, but I'll save you the time by saying that it went downhill FAST. I'll give you perspective that the budget of a film means nothing to me. Sure, I love the special effects that make the big-budget films soar and help tell the story, but I like the low-budget, indie films just as well, provided it tells a good story. This film has neither. When they started to rush, they lost the viewer by getting off track, and seemingly changing the actual story line, making it confusing, wobbly-paced, and completely destroying the story. Not intense, not scary, not interesting. Save your time and enjoy a good indie thriller or a big-budget film that you've yet to see.

This movie had its promise, really interesting building and background legend. Unfortunately the authors forgot that the beauty is in the simplicity. The first two thirds do have some promise, but after that the movie slips into really over-combined mess.

Too much characters are packed in very small place and strange and totally illogical things do happen without any logical reason. This mess actually only confuses the viewer, it does not add drama nor thrill.

I seriously do like movies about strange buildings like "The Toolbox Murders" but the beauty of it is in clarity and simplicity. You simply do not want to see story in which the catharsis is mess of various scenes without any logic or reason. You basically know how the movie ends but you have no idea why it ended this particular way.

This movie would need serious clean up and simplification of the last third part to be actually good. It is just incomprehensible and the characters introduced in the first two thirds are mostly wasted. What a disappointment!