Lockout

The story line of this film is almost completely non-sensical. The director/writer of this film took ideas/concepts from other films and tried to put them together into a 'uniquely' drawn out story (with the always great 'twist' ending), however, the end product is a piece of garbage. The characters in this story lack any depth whatsoever. The film contains no original scoring, poor editing, and at times, even worse acting. The director/writer clearly did not care about his characters and it shows in his work. While I hate to slam the 'efforts' of a low budget film maker, everyone should steer clear of this wasted effort. I did manage to sit through the entire 'experience' and can only offer that if you are feeling sad, lonely or just misunderstood, watch this film, you will laugh at how ridiculous it is.

First off, Lockout is low budget. If you don't care for low budget horror then you will probably wish to pass on this film. Personally, I believe a good low budget horror film is a true piece of work and the film makers have to work that much harder to make up for tight funding. Lockout was a surprisingly disturbingly edgy tale.

Dan (Kris Desautels) finds himself out of a job, a victim to outsourcing. For a change of pace and to soften the financial hit, he, his insecure wife Chris (Cyn Dulay), and her younger obnoxiously, self-deluded sister Roweena (Claire Davenport II) move to Dan's second home in Wisconsin. Matters turn dark when Roweena attempts to set up shop as a call girl in the rural area and is contacted to entertain a grisly fetish.

Save the constant barrage of four letter expletives reminiscent of a Rob Zombie film, acting is solid here. The film is careful and stingy with story clues. Shock and gore is viciously let loose in masterfully timed shotgun bursts that slap hard and without warning. It is a far from perfect film, but it is engaging.

Islas is a film-maker whom knows what he wants to see on film, and has the resources to make it happen. As in the case of "Lockout", the director challenges the audience to try and figure out where the story is going, and turns a three-sixty to brilliant effect. The film evolves around a dysfunctional family who are forced to relocate from a posh Chicago lifestyle to a rural Wisconsin existence. When strange occurrences start to happen, the family is pitted against each other to a riveting climax. "Lockout" is dark, and shot beautifully by low budget master Ricardo Islas. A believable cast and superb writing makes this a must see for any true indie horror fan.

I didn't have high expectations going into this movie, having seen more than my fair share of awful direct-to-video horror films, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised by Lockout. It's clearly a low-budget movie, but the director and actors prove to be fairly adept at working within those parameters and still coming out with an intriguing, competent little film. In that way and several others it reminded me of the little-seen German serial-killer movie Schramm (1993).

There were some flaws here that prevented Lockout from falling into that "great but unknown" category. While the acting is far above par for this kind of movie, a few scenes did fall a little flat. The pacing could be a little tighter overall. And at the end of the movie there's a sort of big reveal which isn't particularly compelling (or unexpected, by the time it happens).

Overall the dialog is much better than I would have expected, though, from the naturalistic-sounding phone call in the first scene to rest of the character's conversations. The focus of the movie tends to be on the characters and their emotional state, rather than the larger plot, and as such it tends more towards evoking unsettled moods over outright shocks and scares, which is fine with me. It also has a few thematic subtexts that are more complex, and better executed, than is common in the genre, although some of these seem a bit muddled up by the end of the film.

I'm not much of a gore-hound myself, but there is one fairly graphic gore scene. I think the director was wise to concentrate his effects budget in a few places instead of just hurling red paint everywhere, but the level of violence is probably not enough for voracious gore-hounds and a little extreme for the more typical horror fan.

Overall this one is definitely worth a look, especially if you are a fan of more cerebral, low-key horror. It's certainly much better than the 3.2 rating it's currently hovering at.

I don't mind low budget movies - "Saw" started out with a small budget & worked very well. Even the "Blair Witch Project" had some redeeming moments. Unfortunately, this one didn't.

From the very beginning, I couldn't understand what the plot in this movie was supposed to be about.

I understood that the lead character was undergoing some serious issues in his life, which affected those around him, but there seemed to be too many obscure incidents being introduced that had little or no relevance to what was going on in the movie.

In the end, I decided to log on here to see if anyone else had the "answer" to what the heck was supposed to be happening - unfortunately not.

Personally, I wouldn't invest my time on this wasted effort. It's not the money I was concerned about losing, it's the time I'll never get back again :-(