Trapped Alive

I had never heard about this 1988 horror movie titled "Trapped Alive" prior to sitting down to watch it here in 2022. I stumbled upon "Trapped Alive" by random chance, and of course I had to watch it, as it was a horror movie that I had never seen before.

The storyline in "Trapped Alive", as written by Leszek Burzynski and Julian Weaver. Is pretty straight forward actually, and easy to follow. However, on the same note, it should also be said that "Trapped Alive" is also a very generic and predictable movie. But at the same time it is a late 1980s horror movie that essentially has every corny ingredient to it; a generic horror plot, an implausible storyline that makes little sense if you look at it objectively, amazingly well-lit subterranean mine shafts, characters dumber than wood, a subterranean cannibalistic crazed person, toe-curling bad acting performances. So what's not to like here?

The acting performances in the movie were for the majority fairly okay for a movie of this caliber. But the acting performance put on towards the end of the movie by actress Elizabeth Kent (playing Rachel) was just so cringeworthy to behold that it has to be seen to be believed.

The pacing of the movie is slow, and nothing much of anything worthwhile happens before 51 minutes into the ordeal. And with a movie that runs at 92 minutes, then it was just too little too late.

Visually then director Leszek Burzynski's 1988 movie wasn't outstanding. The creature design wasn't scary or anything, and it made for a very sloppy on-screen-creature.

While I managed to sit through "Trapped Alive", I was only mildly entertained. And I can in all honesty say that this is not a movie that I will ever be returning to watch a second time.

My rating of "Trapped Alive" lands on a very generous four out of ten stars.

I give this film a 7 only as an enjoyably bad movie - so it gets that score for being cheesy and fun. To its credit, you never know what is going to happen next - it seems like five screenplays were thrown into a blender and they filmed that. Escaped prisoners, two innocent girls driving home late at night, abandoned mines, sleazy cops, cannibal miners, a little gore, ta-da! We laughed and enjoyed how bad it was. Everything you would want in a 80's horror/action movie. Veteran actor Cameron Mitchell (who was on Broadway in the original cast of Death Of A Salesman and then became an International B-movie actor) plays a worried father of one of the kidnapped girls but he's hardly in it. He must of had a mortgage payment due. Check out this bizarre cheesefest. You Will Be Trapped & Entertained!

Three convicts escape from prison at Xmas time. They hijack a car containing two young women who are off to a party, and they all find themselves trapped in an abandoned mine. Not much horror so far but eventually, one by one, they are attacked by a hideous cannibalistic mine dweller. A cop also joins the group, but not until after he has broken off his search and had sex with a frustrated housewife who lives next to the mine! There are two ways of looking at movies like these. Firstly there is the honest review, based on merit. In this instance I would score it 3/10. This is a BAD movie, be it the terrible, over the top acting, the laughable scenarios within the film or the whole cheesiness of it. The other way of looking at it is entertainment value, and this one did make me chuckle numerous times, on the grounds that it was so laughably bad. For that I would score it 6/10, so I'm going with 5/10 overall. Cameron Mitchell is in the cast, a good actor who just looks completely out of place. The rest of the cast can't act but they seemed to be having fun. There is a little sex & nudity but it doesn't have a great deal of gore.It is also a little slow to go going horror-wise, and even then it does not come to much. The sets used for the mine were pretty good.

I first saw this in the late 90s on a vhs. Revisited it recently aft reading Ba_harrison's hilarious review. This movie is indeed unintentionally funny. The old geezer's/monster's white hair, the girl's out dated undergarments, the end speech and Mongo's face n guts. On a snowy Christmas nite, three convicts break outta prison n they carjack taking two women as hostages but things turn ugly when the car plummets down a mine shaft, trapping all the five fellas down. Well, like they say outta the frying pan into the fire. Unknown to em, an ol Alexander Pearce with snowy hair has been inhabiting the mine. The film lacks tension n the twist is very predictable. The kills r very few n nothing gory, except for the offscreen one. I thot that Mongo the Rubeus Hagrid lookalike will put up some fight man. Cameron Mitchell is totally wasted.

The most frustrating thing about this film is that it had all the right pieces to be so much better. A creepy abandoned mine setting, a deformed cannibal hunting unsuspecting victims... but we end up with maybe five minutes of that promised premise at the most, with the film wasting 95% of its run time on multiple storylines of unrelated, unentertaining drama. It could have been up there as a classic, memorable slasher, had it done away with all the unnecessary filler in favour of bloody kills and more cannibal action, but unfortunately we're just left with a brief taste of what could have been in the end. The acting and production value are decent enough at least, but those things are wasted on a film as boring as this.