The Tomb

The Tomb (2006): This was offered as a movie based on a story by H. P. Lovecraft who was a superior writer of horror fiction. If there is a connection to Lovecraft, it is masterfully masked by inept filmmaking. Shot in an empty building with some temporary fencing and industrial shelving, I could have sworn I was looking in the back of a discount store warehouse. There is no action, mostly unintelligible dialogue, and no plot to speak of. The movie goes something like this; a gal drops into the shelved area after being dropped through a hole in the ceiling. She is wrapped in clear plastic and eventually comes to and unwraps herself. Well, she has a number of injuries and lots of fake blood painted on various parts. Soon, a guy drops in similarly wrapped, but with a lot of nails in one elbow and he is not in too good a shape. The two mumble about a couple of things and seem to be in a daze and little of the conversation makes sense. By now, I too was in a daze. After a nap, other people start to drop in and most are in really bad shape and soon die without advancing the plot too far. Their captor tells them to put the dead in the handy dandy coffins that show up regularly. The movie degenerates into repeated appearances of seriously injured people showing up who mumble a few pearls of wisdom and then reach room temperature. The original two continue to get coffins and nail the dead into the coffins as per their verbal instructions. It was very handy to find nails in most of the victims for easy coffin closing. It looks like the same coffin is used all the time and they never seem to have any problem getting rid of all the bodies. The maniac who has locked them in the back of this Wal-Mart lookalike taunts them over his PA system indicating only one will survive.
It is finally revealed that all the dead and pre-dead have somehow wronged the maniac and this is his payback time. The tenuous connection to Lovecraft is that the pre-dead guy remembers seeing a copy of a Lovecraft book at his girlfriend’s apartment. He apparently romanced her away from the maniac. This guy was so ugly I found it hard to believe a woman would leave even a maniac for a swollen balding mumbler like him. I think that is stretching credulity just a bit much, don’t you think?
Finally, the two mental giants figure out that they will have to fight each other to the death to get out. (Not that hard, since they both can hardly walk unaided but can still bleed without assistance.) The gal finally gives the guy a nice one-two with a hatchet and nails him in the magic coffin which shows up again just when needed. Suddenly, a door opens and our murderous ingénue runs out to find a sports car loaded with a pile of money. She grabs the car and goes to a really run down motel, gets in bed and starts reading an H. P. Lovecraft book. HUH? What the herpes is going on? She doesn’t call the police or anyone, just goes to this sleazy motel room to read. Come on! Just as she hunkers down for a good read, Mr. Maniac busts in and tells her if she has sex with him, she can keep the car and money. What? What has he been doing the last few hours? Didn’t he have an opportunity to make this offer quite a while ago? In any event, our morally upright ingénue (well, sort of, since she’s already killed one guy) turns him down and he leaves. But wait, he comes back and starts to force his way with her and she clubs him with a lamp and then goes to sleep with the book and dead maniac. The movie now mercifully ends. Please, if you have any self respect, avoid this movie, it is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. The movie is rated R for: murky dialogue, murky breastulations, murky plot, murky logic, coffins that appear on call, nails in the coffin, nails in the elbow, stretch wrapped victims, multiple hatchet impacts, excessive mumbling, and for the appalling cast depopulation.