The Tunnel (2011)

I gave this movie a chance since most of the reviews were quite positive. Even though I am not really into the found footage genre that much I thought I could give it a shot.Well I kind of regret it.The movie felt like it needed almost an hour to build up the whole story about who and what these people were trying to film and just the whole thing didn't make a lot of sense.Weird spooky things in some tunnels that kill (or eat) people or something? I did not quite get it. There was no explanation whatsoever. Only weird things messing with the protagonists and bad documentary styled footage in between action.The acting was also cringeworthy and the German dub (maybe the English voices are good I do not know) made everything look like a cheap student project.If you like stuff like The Blair Witch Project you might enjoy this but I certainly didn't.

Whether you enjoyed the Blair Witch Project or not, it set a president in these 'found footage' horror films. Over recent years they've been cropping up in every country, showing us the tale of people who - for some reason - feel the need to feel the entire of their supernatural encounter, right up until the point of their demise.This is Australia's entry into the genre.It starts off slow. You can basically skip the entire first half hour - it's all backstory and character-building. Some may like a slow start, others won't, but, either way, you'll still be able to understand the film if you do.It's about four members of a news crew who go below Sydney into the abandoned underground system to get a story. Naturally, they get more than they bargained for. Unfortunately, what follows is simply the same as you'll see in any other 'found footage' film. You have people running around screaming, talking into camera, shaky camera-work, only brief flashes of whatever is hunting them, the obligatory night-vision shots, getting lost and bickering with each other and so on.Yes, it's well acted and nicely presented, but, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the film were the 'interviews.' Whereas in other 'found footage' films they go the other way and have a piece of text at the beginning telling (spoiling?) the viewer by saying this footage was all that was found, i.e. everyone in the film is dead or missing. The Tunnel Movie interviews the survivors all the way through the film, cutting their thoughts on what they've filmed. For me this kind of told me who survives and who doesn't. I felt the interviews should have been taken out all together. At least that way the viewer wouldn't know who lives and who dies until the end.The Tunnel Movie is okay. There's nothing bad I can really say about it, but then there's nothing that I haven't seen before. If it was released before Blair Witch, it would have been the benchmark with which all others are measured against. Sadly, it's nearly fifteen years too late for that title, therefore it gets lost in the multitude of 'Blair Witch clones.' Not bad, but nothing new.http://thewrongtreemoviereviews.blogspot.co.uk/

Wow, I don't know why I put myself through the pain of watching this all of the way through. Maybe it's because I was also playing Poker on-line and was able to look away from the movie some of the time. So much footage using a night-vision hand-held (and very shaky) camera, watching blurry walls and blurry bits of light completely ruined what may have been a 3 or 4 (out of 10) movie. I know it was made on a shoe-string budget - even less, but so much time spent using hand-held night camera when there was a real one right next to it really made it a 1 (awful). A few moments using that camera would have been fine - putting others in the setting. I like thrillers, and the idea here that started in the beginning seemed to be OK at first. But it quickly fell into the abyss and they spent too much time using documentary style (which would have been OK to begin, and end the movie with) and not enough acting & quality dialog.

A hand-held camera movie, it details the experiences of a professional reporting crew going into the underground tunnels of Sydney to look for whatever made the government stop wanting to go there. They find it. They don't like it. The feeling is mutual.Now, for a found footage film it was not a bad one. It had a good reason for people to be filming and for the quality of the film to be good. Unfortunately the crew also carried handhelds with night vision, thus prompting every monster shot to be a blurry sepia mess. The interview and footage montage scheme was also useful, because it makes the viewer relate to the characters more, even if it didn't make me empathize with them at all. They were all self absorbed assholes, despite attempts to make them seem bonded as a group.Unfortunately, the rest of the movie was not really that good. It's 40 minutes of interviews, set up and moving around tunnels until something actually happens. Then they run around like headless chickens until they manage to get out. And that's all. The tension is pretty strong, but it leads to nothing but blind terror. There is no closure, no explanation, no real story other than "it happened". And in the end, the interviews just made it all feel more distant. You know who is going to survive and it kind of spoils the mood when people are hiding in a dark room waiting to see if something is going to kill them and you get an interview bit right then.So I can't say that the film was a failure, but with top movies like The Descent and Cloverfield in mind, this one is pretty lame. Also, considering the budget, which was probably very small, I feel they could have done more.