I saw the trailer for this and it reminded me a lot of The Raid. The plot is fairly simple here: a mute gentleman's daughter is kidnapped and he endeavors to rescue her. He meets up with another fellow who is looking for his wife who was investigating the abductions of children and they team up as they have common cause and both are exceptional martial artists.
And so there are lots of lots of fights that seem to go on for hours. Don't get me wrong, they're fun, at first, but I get lost quickly with all those quick cuts and a bit bored as the fights reach the 10 minute mark. They're just interminable.
One fight scene takes place in a refrigerator factory and our heroes seemingly put down one of the bad guy's henchmen, Ho, who is built like a brick shithouse. Towards the end of the movie Ho quite remarkably regains consciousness and makes his way to the police station where the two heroes are locked in mortal combat with two really bad baddies. Thus we get this five-way conflagration that was chaotic fun until it wasn't.
I knew what I was getting into here and went because I wanted to spend time with my friend. And these types of movies aren't torture. The theater was, I think, the smallest at Point but it was fairly well populated.
Seen at a screening of Backrooms at Flix Brewhouse.
I enjoyed Backrooms quite a bit and intend to watch the web series it is based upon. No doubt it has led to the word "liminal" being added to the vocabularies of millions who missed Exit 8.
The movie's strength was the mystery of the backrooms and all the unheimlichy goodness therein. But I suppose it needed some kind of plot, some kind of hook so that it didn't go too far down the path of Inland Empire obscurity. And so we open with scenes demonstrating that scientists are investigating the titular spaces before we are introduced to Clark, who runs a furniture store, the basement of which has a door to the backrooms. Clark also has a failing marriage but a good relationship with the bottle, the latter much to the chagrin of his therapist.
Clark investigates the backrooms and lures a couple of his employees into helping him. As you can imagine, things go wrong and Clark descends into madness. His therapist, Mary, investigates and discovers the backrooms. She eventually finds her patient and learns that, while he may have been right about the seemingly impossible liminal space he rambled on about in his therapy sessions, he has also lost touch with reality, however weird it truly is. There's a hideously perverted Alice in Wonderland tea party type of scene in which we come to understand that Clark has completely lost it and we also learn the identity of the monster we've only heard and seen brief glimpses of until now.
Mary eventually escapes and is captured by researchers from the Async Research Institute. In a Lovecraftian type of scene ("The Statement of Mary Kline"?), Mary is seated across a table from an Async scientist who offers her some modest explanations to complement her own experiences.
The whole Async angle seemed superfluous to me. It broke the spell a bit. People wandering the (non-Euclidian?) backrooms was spooky and unnerving, their madness when confronted with such an enigma understandable. Clark's explanation of the space as a faulty copy of reality was enough. Knowing that experts are on the case takes the edge off things. Now, if, like in the Southern Reach series, the Async investigations had all ended horribly, that would preserve the mystery, maintain the enigma for me. But their investigations seem to be far-reaching and ongoing.
Still, it should be said that Backrooms kept most of the mystery alive. It, thankfully, didn't have the Async boffin offer a thorough explanation. Creepy, uncanny, some potential non-Euclidian geometry, and descent into madness when confronted with the unknowable, Backrooms has all the trappings of a Lovecraftian tale - it just moves the setting from early 20th century New England to 1990s suburbia.
