Goreripper

One of the biggest problems I have with this film - apart from the fact that it actually exists - is that, in the hands of finer craftsmen and with a stronger budget, it could have been quite good. The premise, while familiar, could have been put to good effect: an accused witch's curse comes back to haunt the people of a small New England hamlet 300 years after she was wrongfully burnt at the stake. Ultimately however, 'The Devonsville Terror' just lays down and dies quite quickly, offering no suspense or horror whatsoever outside of a cheap play at being a bad exploitation film here and there (at the beginning and again at the end, where almost the same things happen) with a minorly repulsive 'shock' somewhere in the middle. The film is so cheap the producers don't seem to have even been able to afford to pay more than one of the female actors to go topless, blowing the budget instead on pulling unconvincing maggot stunts and a laughable torn by dogs sequence, stealing the melting head scene from 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', having a ghostly, horribly burnt face with a full head of hair float around and making the heroine shoot laser beams out of her eyes! An unintentional murder apparently releases the vengeful spirits of three women brutalised hundreds of years before; the superstituous, horribly-cliched small town hicks naturally think the spirits have taken possession of three female outsiders: a radio broadcaster, an environmentalist and the newly-appointed school teacher who hitch-hikes into town and falls foul of the townsfolk by telling her pupils that the Babylonian chief god was a woman. Eventually, after some extended film time where nothing very interesting happens, the locals decide to do them in. All the while the village doctor is trying to purge Devonsville of its curse by exposing his patients to seemingly meaningless hypnotherapy that exists only to allow more lame scenes of women being victimised. Apart from a rather nasty scene where one poor girl is dragged to death behind a pick-up, it would all be quite appalling if it wasn't so half-baked. Because it is, it's appalling for very different reasons.

"Cube" is a dark and disturbing film that is sure to inspire feelings of paranoia, estrangement and mistrust in any viewer. The stark setting, the inescapable frustration of a thoroughly unexplained situation and the very human actions of the characters makes this a singularly powerful piece of psychological cinema. A cop, a doctor, an architect, a prisoner, a brilliant math student and an intellectually disabled man wake to find themselves imprisoned in a cube-shaped room with a single door in each wall. All complete strangers, none of them know why they are there, how they got there, what purpose the structure has nor who built it. To work their way through the puzzle, they have to survive the fiendish traps hidden randomly throughout, like the acid jets which burn off one guy's face and the invisible razor mesh which reduces another inmate to a pile of square-shaped chunks in the opening sequence. Once they slowly discover what's going on, even if they don't know why, avoiding the traps turns out to be the easy part as their own psychological breakdowns caused by their unique and inexplicable circumstances prove to be the deadliest obstacle of all. This is a tense, claustrophobic and sadistic science fiction thriller in which the main enigmas of who and why are never revealed, given even more impact in light of the subsequent rise in popularity of voyeuristic TV shows like 'Survivor'. "Cube" takes the phrase 'thinking outside the square' to a whole new level.