Death Tunnel touts a "based on true events!" tagline, but that's stretching it quite a bit. The actual story is that decades ago, the Waverly Hills Sanatorium in
The rest of the story — college girls in skimpy nightgowns running from malevolent spirits — is completely made up. (However, the film was shot on location inside the Sanatorium, and it's a super-creepy, ultra realistic backdrop for an otherwise routine horror story.)
Death Tunnel starts out with a lingerie party in which five young ladies — three popular snobs, and two hot-but-somehow-unpopular newbies — are kidnapped and placed, blindfolded and bound, inside the supposedly haunted grounds. What was meant to be a prank on the behalf of a few frat boys soon turns tragic when it's revealed that each young woman has a familial connection with the Waverly Hills Sanatorium. "Five floors, five girls, five hours," is the catchphrase that counts down with reduced numbers for each death and every passing hour.
Once each girl has freed herself of her ties, she is encouraged by a disembodied voice to explore her floor. The three snobs are separated, but the two nice girls are together. Each one has a letter on her negligee spelling out D-E-A-T-H, and each one tries to figure the best way out of the hospital (with dire consequences in most cases). Along the way, they encounter grimy, ghoulish ghosts and spooky sense memories that still linger in the fetid air. They explore the haunted morgue, fall down elevator shafts, and take hot showers in the buff (in case you're wondering how a long-abandoned, definitely derelict building out in the middle of nowhere has clean, hot running water… you're watching the wrong movie! It's haunted, folks. Anything can happen).
First-time director Philip Adrian Booth (who also did nearly everything else on this film, ala Robert Rodriguez) shows promise, but the major problem with the movie is a lack of escalation. Suspense is not built much, because once the girls are inside the abandoned hospital the level of scares and violence is established right away and pretty much stays at the same intensity for quite a long while. You'll also need to be able to overlook some mathematical and continuity errors, and forgive The Shining rip-offs.
The thing that struck me best about Death Tunnel was the slick visual approach — it's definitely derivative (you'll see elements of director William Malone's style, the recent
What's not so good is the amateurish acting (I was genuinely surprised to see that the core five have previous film and TV experience), and the contrived storyline we've already seen a million times. However, if you like traditional ghost stories as I do, then Death Tunnel most likely won't be a disappointment for you. Out of the three DVDs I watched on the same day (House of the Dead II and The Choke being the other two), Death Tunnel was the pick of the litter.
The additional release material on the DVD is abundant. Which is great if you want to perv on bimbos being photographed in their underwear (Death is in Fashion featurette), or if you want to watch Poison look-a-likes (that would be the fraternal filmmakers, Philip Adrian Booth and Christopher Saint Booth) trying to pass off photos with lens-flare as actual spirit photography in the Behind the scenes featurette. In all fairness, some of the Behind the scenes featurette was worthwhile — learning that EVP recordings were used in the music, an interview with the current owner of the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, and period photographs of the patients, were all interesting.
DVD Features:
Available Subtitles: English, Spanish
Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 5.1)
Behind the scenes featurette
"Death is in Fashion" featurette
Photo gallery
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson