Death Tunnel

Death Tunnel (2005): Well, there’s the Lincoln tunnel, the Holland tunnel and other useful tubes around the world but this tunnel appears devoid of anything useful. It starts out with five college bimbettes being talked into staying in an abandoned hospital used to treat some sort of plague that hit Kentucky back in the 30’s. Apparently it was incurable and you developed a terminal rash and then got hidden in the death tunnel so the hospital could hide the fact that everyone sent there was dying. You hear a lot of train whistles apparently warning you the train is coming to pick up the dead bodies but no train ever shows up but at least it sounds like a steam engine from the thirties. That theme seems to disappear midway through this mess along with a lot of other plot threads that seem to get snipped in the shuffle.

The gals all are wearing negligibles and there is an early nekkid shower scene. Ok where did the hot water come from? This sequence of events makes you suspect we may have stumbled into a low end semi-naked co-eds in peril movie. But no, as soon as you lower your expectations sufficiently (or raise them for some of us) we suddenly get an artsy fartsy cut to old newsreels showing what happened historically and pointing to ghosts and unsavory health care practices while the nudity just plain disappears along with much of the plot.
Then it turns out the gals are all related to someone who worked or died there 70 years ago and they all start getting eliminated (but not in the Death Tunnel) as the movie progresses. There is a stumble bum guy running around in a modified gas mask that appears dangerous but never gets close to anyone. Later the gals appear in old pictures pasted on the walls and turn out to look exactly like some of the nurses who died there in the past. So are they ghosts too? What the heck is going on here? Well don’t expect an answer; it appears they changed plot lines so many times during the filming they just couldn’t decide which ones to keep and kept ‘em all. The titular death tunnel which you are expected to believe has a central role in the movie is barely seen. The last two survivors run through it without much of a problem at the end of the movie, get outside and then decide they really belong in the abandoned hospital and go back. WHAT!!!! After 85 minutes of trying to escape, two get out and then go back through the death tunnel (again with apparent ease)….give me a break. They should have called it the dirty tunnel, or the gross tunnel or even the disgusting but safe tunnel, but Death Tunnel, come on. The flick is really far worse than it sounds here so I’d stay out of the Death Tunnel if I were you. The movie is rated R for: one gratuitous nekkid shower scene, inane dialogue, safe tunnels, multiple partially completed plotlines, multiple bleeding, multiple useless scene cuts, and especially for another set of really dumb college kids.