Five girls are chosen to participate in an unusual game to be held in a creepy and sinister abandoned hospital, which in the past had been the scene of death due to a violent epidemic and is now said to be haunted by ghosts. The five contestants, one per floor of the hospital, will be forced to wander for five hours through the decaying and gloomy corridors of the hospital. The rules: five girls, five floors, five hours. The game begins!
"Death Tunnel" is an American horror film released in 2005 for the home video market only and which certainly deserved at least a miserable theatrical release.
The film, directed by Philip Adrian Booth, who also took care of editing and screenwriting, is difficult to evaluate, as it suffers from enormous problems at the level of the story but which are totally compensated by decisively excellent technical characteristics.
The story, which at first seems to offer good premises for making a creepy and terrifying ghost movie, fails to meet the expectations of the viewer. In fact, what starts as an original idea soon turns into a clumsy copy of "The Haunting of Hill House," while the screenplay proves to be extremely poor in content, quickly falling into monotony, so much so that for the first fifty minutes you are forced to see five girls wandering aimlessly through the hospital corridors. To remedy this lack of content and avoid the film lasting only a few minutes, it was decided to pad the film with various references to the past when the hospital was still operational, or with frequent sudden flashes on ghosts, with the intention of scaring the viewer but which fail miserably.
But as previously mentioned, what fascinates the viewer is not the story or the screenplay (which, on the contrary, leave much to be desired) but all the extremely well-cared-for technical aspects: the direction, although very frenetic and at times confusing, can still be fascinating; the photography is decisively very well cared for and suggestive; but what certainly stands out the most is the way the editing was done, which appears fast and kinetic but manages to give a touch of originality to the film (so much so that at the end of the viewing it will seem to have watched more of a trailer than a one-and-a-half-hour film), making it, probably, fascinating for some but unbearable for others.
But the true strength of the film lies in the sets; in fact, by setting the film in a real abandoned hospital, the environments turn out to be perfect for a ghost-themed horror film and manage to create a gloomy, unsettling, and very suggestive atmosphere.
Finally, other unstable points of the film are given by the unprofessional cast, and hence disappointing, and the gore-splatter level; as the film offers only a few simple slightly bloody scenes but no really strong sequence that, given the atmosphere of the film, could have been easily inserted without damaging the final result.
In conclusion, this "Death Tunnel" is a horror film with many problems due to an amateurish screenplay, but compensated by very professional technical qualities. An unusual horror film that either fascinates or terribly disappoints.
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