20131127: Horror Review--Stalled

Stalled

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. British live action feature length film, 2013, NR, 82 minutes, horror, comedy.
2. IMDB: 5.0/10.0 from 217 audience ratings. Spoken word is in English.  Estimated budget, 450 thousand pounds.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 'No Score Yet,' 47% liked it from 21 audience ratings.
4. Netflix: 2.6/5.0 from 6,609 audience ratings.
5. Directed by: Christian James.  Written by Dan Palmer.
6. Starring: Dan Palmer as WC, Antonia Bernath as Heather, Tamaryn Payne as Evie, Mark Holden as Jeff From I.T., Giles Alderson as Nick Shanks.


2. Setup and Plot
1. Christmas Eve, somewhere in the UK.  There's a corporate party.  There's also a complaint about a smell in the ladies' rest room.  Our hero, WC, extracts the dead rat causing the smell from the ceiling fan vent.  Two women in skimpy costumes come in, so WC hides in a stall on top of a stool.


2. One of the women turns zombie, then bites the other.  WC drops his cell phone into the toilet, which fries it.  Then the first two zombies go after WC.  He kills the first., then the second.  More zombies come in.  Soon enough, WC is trapped in the loo.  More zombies come to the toilet.  Fortunately for WC, they are, by and large, slow zombies.


3. He gets another cell phone from a zombie, then calls the police.  Unfortunately, he does this at the moment of conversion.  Evie is in the second stall over, and she has also not converted.  Jeff from IT shows up, strong and not infected, but WC unintentionally infects him.  Their chances grow slimmer.


4. Evie and WC talk from 33 minutes until 41 minutes.  That inspired zero laughs, rather like the movie as a whole.  WC gets his ladder, and makes an attempt to get his tool box.  He get the toolbox, but loses the ladder.  The conversation resumes, only on a more ribald note.  Evie throws him a pill, and he makes the awful mistake of taking it; he has not experience with drugs, so he's screwed.


5. While drugged, WC just walks out of his stall and the zombies take him where he wants to go.  Sure.  Then Evie finally makes contact, and the false memories fade.


6. Some truths come out.  The management had fired him.  On the way out, he stole some fund for a 'good cause' whatever that was.  He also stole Evie's cell phone, that is, the one he dropped down the toilet.


7. By another happy circumstance, he gets his hammer for a while, only to get his hand grabbed and bloodied...or so he thought.  He needs to get swinging with the hammer.  He does get to a crawl space that might get them out, or not.  Evie turns out to be really large, and likely won't fit.  She sacrifices herself to give him more of a chance.


8. He follows a crawl space to another vent, but only zombies are in the connecting room.  He tries other rooms.  Finally, he wraps himself in toilet paper and breaks through the zombies.  He meets the real Evie, and she seems OK, except she got lacerated by one of the zombies.


9. Will he make it out alive, talk to his mum, have a Happy Christmas?


3. Conclusions
1. Yikes, another vanity film; screenwriter = principal actor.
2. One line summary: Low end vanity film, and the low end of the zombie genre.
3. One star of five.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 6/10 Poor.  Has sort of a VHS feel to it: low contrast, washed out, sometimes grainy.


2. Sound: 6/10  Hollow.  Has that bad VHS hollowness.  I wonder what equipment they used to record such bad sound.


3. Acting: 1/10  There is only Dan Palmer, and he is not worth anything.


4. Screenplay: 1/10 Nonsense.  Perhaps 15 minutes of plot spread over 82 minutes.  The zombies are not funny, WC and Evie (actually Heather) are not funny, the drug nonsense is beyond stupid. The zombies are a threat, then they are not, then they are.  It is totally inconsistent.