Main cast: Vinessa Shaw (Brita), Kip Pardue (Mike), Scott Adkins (Carl), Karl Geary (Joe), Sarah Barrand (Michele), Rachel Oliva (Claire), and Breckin Meyer (Tony)
Director: Peter A Dowling
Hmm, this is another horror movie released in 2008 that features monsters that lurk in the tunnels of the subway train network. In this one, we have a bunch of guys and two women running frantically in the dark to avoid being eaten by caveman-like cannibals.
It’s Mike’s stag night, but he and his friends Joe and Carl are thrown out of the club, thanks to his brother Tony being a trouble-making pest. On the train home, Tony again tries too hard to annoy the hell out of everyone and gets hit by Brita, a bookish stripper on her way home with her friend Michele, with a pepper spray. When the train stops, these idiots leave the train for a while to get some fresh air. What do you know, the train takes off before these twits can get back on board, and now they have to wander around in the dark as hungry cannibals wait in the shadows to go yum-yum-yum on them.
This movie has some pretty great scenes of gore, including a gorgeous beheading scene, but these moments are ruined by our cast of dweebs reacting in stoned indifference while witnessing these atrocities. Suddenly, these scenes aren’t so scary after all! It also doesn’t help that the movie is so dark at many moments that it’s hard to figure out what is going on. All that slow-motion extreme gore is wasted by headache-inducing camera work and low-budget lighting that fails too often.
Ultimately, though, the movie’s biggest failure lies in its stupid characters. These characters are pretty dumb even when judged by the typical horror movie character’s state of intelligence. Right from the moment when Carl stupidly decides to get separated from the others to get some nookie with Michele, the stupid marathon escalates all the way to the final scene. It’s hard to enjoy the gore and the claustrophobia when the deaths of these imbeciles seem like the most natural thing in the world. Removing the dumb from the human gene pool and all that, you know? Tony is easily the most annoying gnat ever, and he just won’t go away for so long, ugh.
At any rate, there is some potential in this movie, but the good stuff is heavily diluted by shoddy production work and the confounding stupidity of the main characters. Oh, and the bad guys die so easily in the end too despite coming off like murderous Energizer bunnies for so long in the movie. Stag Night is definitely a missed opportunity.
