THE DEVIL'S TOMB

A group of mercenaries is hired by a CIA agent to recover a scientist in a secret base in the Middle Eastern desert. The base has been isolated after an earthquake, and the only communication that came out shows the doctor in an obvious state of confusion. The task force manages to penetrate the laboratories, but the object the scientists were working on is something unimaginable, an ancient and highly dangerous entity. It is quite rare for works of this caliber to ultimately turn out to be of good quality; usually, they are shoddy, poverty-stricken films produced in series, printed directly on DVD, and of which almost certainly no one will remember in the years to come. "Devil's Tomb" does not break the rule, except for the fact that it features a respectable cast that, at least in the premises, would have at least allowed the film to start with an extra gear. And yet nothing. We are faced with the usual, useless, boring, and stylistically anonymous little film that, if seen at the right moment, could at most be useful as an alternative to a sleeping pill. Everything feels like it has been seen before, everything is so banal and lacking in imagination that it plunges even the most stimulated of viewers into a worrying state of depression. First of all, it heavily copies the first film in the "Resident Evil" saga: there are these soldiers, mixed by gender and ethnicity, who venture into a complex of underground laboratories; there is even the digital map of the Alvear…pardon, of the laboratory complex shown full-screen to the viewer, showing the path that our heroes will have to follow. But there are also the flooded rooms with glass walls in which corpses float that are not really dead, there are our heroes decimated by the demonized guys, there is the traitor, there is something dark in the protagonist's past, there is the final countdown…eehhh, there is so much stuff that it would allow Sony Screen Gems to gloat with lawyers, if it were not for the fact that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment itself distributes (in the US) the DVD of "Devil's Tomb" (acquired for Italian distribution by the all-catching Mondo Home Entertainment). The pace is lacking for most of the film, a defect amplified by the fact that on paper "Devil's Tomb" was supposed to be an action horror, with soldiers armed to the teeth facing off against bloodthirsty demons. And yet the whole thing gets lost in chatter, the demons – with a horrible makeup – act very little, there is just a rare splash of blood, and even the final climax, which should be the apotheosis of action, ends with a long conversation and an explosion. I am still wondering how the editor came up with the idea to edit the flashbacks in that way, inserted awkwardly at the most unexpected moments and guilty of significantly slowing down an already wrong pace. Add to this some of the least interesting characters ever seen in a film of this kind, which you seriously tend to confuse with each other due to overcrowding, uniforms, and the uselessness of most of them. Then again, a couple of subject-level insights are not even bad, starting with the identity of the evil that plagues the laboratories, but it is all so dictated by inertia that it finds no value. The direction is without personality and is signed by Jason Connery – son of the far more capable Sean "007" Connery – who usually struggles as an actor in Z-grade films ("Wishmaster 3", "Alone in the Dark 2", "Brotherhood of Blood") and here makes his debut behind the camera without changing his aim. What surprises is seeing a cast composed of known actors, some even cult, like Ron Perlman, Bill Moseley, Ray Winstone, Henry Rollins, and even Cuba Gooding Jr. in the leading role! But apart from Henry Rollins, who seems to put effort into the role of the crazy priest, it is evident that none of the involved believe in the project, especially the disoriented and lazy Gooding Jr., now trapped in a declining career. What can I say? "Devil's Tomb" is the classic direct-to-video movie that one should avoid to not endure an hour and a half of boring, poorly made nonsense. Foolish man warned…