Subterano Movie Review

You can dress Tasma Walton up in a leather body suit, but that won't make her Carrie-Anne Moss. And you can put a ridiculous VR plot into Subterano, but that sure as hell won't make it The Matrix.

Esben Storm puts this VR-becomes-just-R thriller in the menacing environment of an Aussie parking garage, with (yipes!) some menacing children's toys (somehow escaped from the game universe) chasing a bunch of modern-day role-playing gamers around the ramps. Of course, CGI toys costs money, so often the robots are real kiddie toys: remote-control cars, plastic spheres strung on wire, or bouncy balls simply tossed at the cast. Maybe these are those mini-RC cars that those spam messages tell me are all the rage!

Sounds like a really lame VR game if you ask me -- it certainly makes for an uneventful movie, a man vs. machine story that doesn't even give us the crutch of having the bad guy take the form of Russell Crowe.

From the plastic-pants costuming to the ultra low-grade effects to the lack of any discernable acting talent, Subterano is nowhere near worthy of its pretty cool title and bloody-hand-reaching-up DVD cover.

Writer/director Esben Storm seems mostly to work on Australian television, and his stars don't really seem to have worked much at all (though lead Alex Dimitriades was in Ghost Ship!). Any sense of stage presence is nonexistant, the script is plodding, and the direction is simplistic. Sure, there are extremely few cinematic touches you can add when your entire movie is set in a parking garage... which would lead a cynic to wonder why you would write a screenplay which took place in one....

Subterano just isn't scary, interesting, or close to watchable. Chucky, where are you when we need you?