Les emmurés

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.

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!

Walled In is the kind of horror film that sets itself up in a bizarre location and then explains all kinds of bizarre rules to make the scariness work. The movie opens with a series of headlines that explain the terrible discovery of 16 bodies cemented into the walls of a building, including that of the architect who designed it. We learn that the person who walled them in, Joseph Malestrazza, was never caught, and then we cut to 15 years later, when the building is planned to be demolished.

Mischa Barton stars as Samantha, a young member of the demolition company family, perfectly named the Walczak's (the 'c' is silent). She recently graduated from engineering school and it becomes her first lone assignment to visit the building and supervise its demolition. It's a perfect set-up for a horror movie, I suppose, although as soon as we get to the building, the one where the 16 bodies were discovered, you remember, and learn that the wife and son of the murdered architect are still living there, the movie takes a pretty serious turn for the worse. I would think that if a man suffered the terrible fate of being murdered and cemented into the walls of a building, his wife would take it upon herself not to raise their son for his entire life in that building. But that's me.

Upon her arrival we meet the woman living there and her creepy son, who explains things to Samantha that the lights go off every six minutes to conserve energy, she shouldn't go to the 8th floor (that's Malestrazza's quarters, you see, and it's never cleaned), and whatever you do don't go on the roof! I would think that someone planning the demolition of a building would explain the logical deficiency of avoiding certain parts of it, but we understand that this is a horror movie and these goofy rules he's explaining are a set-up for freaky sequences that are to follow. There's also the issue of a few remaining people who lived in the building and who are not likely to appreciate Sam arriving to destroy it. The young boy also worries that Malestrazza will be offended by her plans.

I was reminded of the brilliant novel House of Leaves in a lot of things about the movie. Sam discovers enormous discrepancies between the blueprints and the actual measurements of the house, which in that book led to a fascinating and frightening series of events, but in the movie leads to the cheap and utterly witless third act. There is also a lot of throwbacks to Psycho in the relationship between the young boy and his mother in an isolated location. Sam even describes the building as being "like the Bates Motel, only bigger," and at one point the mother forbids her son to go near Sam, telling him that Sa could never take care of him the way she does. Creepy.

Ultimately we learn about an "ancient architectural belief" that provides the reason that Malestrazza killed people and walled them into his buildings (and also the reason why not one of the 27 buildings that Malestrazza built have ever been torn down). It gives the movie the feel of something with more thought in it that it actually has. I felt a little flicker of interest when this was revealed, but in retrospect it strikes me as little more than a screenwriters brainstorm.

I understand that Walled In is based on a novel, and I hope the novel is better than the movie. Books, especially horror books, are always better than the movie, ad if someone read the book and thought it was good enough to make into a film, it must have been better than this movie, because it has all the sign-posts of a weak horror film. It's full to the brim with cheap scares (notice the Screeching Cat Scare, which at least was made a little bit different but essentially is the same old thing, and my favorite, a scary rose scare. You have to see that one to believe it) and blatantly rips off a whole series of other horror movies. I'm curious what the movie would have looked like had director Gilles Paquet-Brenner never seen Psycho, Texas Chainsaw, and the Nightmare on Elm Street films. He even uses that "One, Two, Freddy's Coming For You" song several times. Real creative there, buddy.

I won't go into the details of the end of the film partly because I don't want to ruin it for you but mostly because it's so dumb that I don't want to bother spending my time explaining it. I will tell you one thing though. There's a particularly amusing scene where the boy accuses Samantha of thinking that he's nothing but a "crazy little boy." You gotta see this scene, man, it's hilarious. At the time that he says that to her, I won't tell you what he happens to be doing, but when you make a statement like that, it's generally not a good time to be acting like a crazy little boy.

What follows that scene is a third act that is not entirely without effect, but definitely one of the dumbest situations that I've seen in a horror movie in some years. It is so bizarre and makes so little sense that the movie almost becomes a mystery. Another mystery is why the thing got made in the first place, but sadly, after seeing the movie, I don't think I'm every going to be able to bring myself to read the book