The Shock Labyrinth (2009)

Where do I even start? The story begins with a group of friends, some good acting,but multiple confusing flashbacks, typical dialog, and a tangled mess of motives,ideas and effects. I don't watch horror often and am reasonablysusceptible to scares and atmosphere when done well. The main hangup is that this entire story makes NO SENSE! Apparently, a group of kids leave their parents while at an amusement park to go to a haunted house under construction. Later on in the story though, when the characters need to find a hospital, they drive there instead. Lo and behold, it actually is a hospital now! Well, at least some parts of it. These people somehow forgot that this haunted house/hospital was the scene of the deadly accident that has plagued them for so many years. One credit I will give this movie is that it has some cool moments. However, they are all in the trailer. Literally, I wish I had just seen the trailer. There is one special gem of utter stupidity that makes this movie stand out in my mind though as a rare kind of bad: The "Grudge"-esque girl died from falling from a spiral staircase in the haunted house, so, naturally, one of her methods of offing her friends is to repeatedly throw herself off the stairs, bludgeoning him to death with her own body, climbing up the stairs after each successful dive. If this doesn't tell you everything you ever needed to know about this film, I don't know what will.

I never worry too much about the scores movies achieve as if something fits into your preferred niche or genre you will enjoy it more than an aggregated score will suggest. Therefore a Japanese horror from the guy who made the grudge which people are saying may be a bit weird and confusing ticked a lot of boxes for me regardless of its 4.Unfortunately 4 is a fair score, the story had real potential, I am not an expert on Japanese culture but it felt true to the kind of supernatural movies we get to see. Movies are either more or less than the sum of its parts therefore it didn't necessarily matter that the movie looked like it was made for TV, the acting was poor (the guy I watched it with thought the lead actor was the worst he had ever seen)! The effects were cheap and sure there were plot holes. I see movies for the emotional impact so can forgive pretty much everything, I don't always understand David Lynch movies but they are beautiful dreamy experiences.So having said that I bring it all down to how I felt about the experience and it was boring, there was no tension or atmosphere. I've seen movies where I didn't care about the characters but this was different, I've enjoyed bad movies but I wasn't sure how I could get through the 85 minute run time. It really is that bad. The story could have been interesting but other than that there were was nothing to redeem this movie.I have only hated 2 movies in my life, this isn't one of them but its probably the movie I have found the most impossible to engage with.

"Shock Labyrinth" really only has it's boffo title and packaging going for it. Everything else about the movie fails to deliver.The plot...well, apparently a group of friends visit a spooky fairground attraction as children and there is some kind of accident in which one of the girls vanishes. Then, 10 or so years later the same friends find themselves tricked into going to an abandoned hospital, which then turns into the same funhouse from their past, and they re-live the frightening experience all over again, possibly as part of the twisted revenge of the missing/dead girl.That might have worked as a plot, in fact on paper it looks pretty good, but watching this movie is absolutely no fun at all. There is but a single key event in the movie, which is that somebody falls over the handrail and down the well of a spiral staircase. Believe it or not, the whole film is constructed to dwell on this one event in as many ways as it is possible. First we see the original accident, then we see it again from another view, then we see other characters go through the same event either as witnesses or as victims themselves, sometimes in their childhood and sometimes in their adult states. The film thinks it's clever in mixing the evens of the past with the present, but it doesn't hold any suspense whatsoever, it just looks like a bunch of kids running in circles and then a bunch of adults running in circles again. The so-called shocks of the labyrinth are provided by (wait for it) a white toy bunny and a yellow balloon with a smiling bumble bee on it. Shots of the bunny in particular are wheeled out interminably, not that a single shot of it provokes any feelings of fear whatsoever. At no point in the film does anything approaching scary happen. Not in one single minute of it, and therefore I count "Shock Labyrinth" as a total failure to entertain.By the way, you might pick up the DVD that comes with both 3D and 2D versions, but if you think the 3D will rescue it, think again. It's totally unwatchable, I only lasted about 1.5 minutes before yanking off the 3D specs and sticking the 2D version on.What a shame.

A bizarre J-"horror" from the one-time golden boy of the genre Takashi Shimizu -- and oh, how the mighty have fallen. His stint in Hollywood helming Sarah Michelle Gellar movies has either sapped his abilities or his mind. Shock Labyrinth feels like a re-tread of the circular storytelling of the original Ju-On films, but with much worse acting, much less gore, and a poor-quality, murky 3D effect shrouding everything in a thick fog. Plot is deliberately dream-like (read: confusing), some kids re-visit a haunted house fairground attraction where "something horrible" happened to them years ago, only for the weirdness to get kick-started again. Put it this way, if you're scared of plush rabbit toys, this is the horror film for you. Everyone else, stay away.