The Hole

source: The Hole

Moviecut—The Hole

The Hole

The Hole isn't that bad a film, its just that it lacks the components which a good thriller/suspence/mystery should have. The Hole, starring Thora Birch, is a suspence/mystery and is about a group of high-school teenagers who become stuck in an old, World War 2 tunnel, called 'the hole'. The group of four decide to camp down in the hole for a few days to wag a school geography camp and have a good time. However, all goes wrong and the four become stuck in the hole for 18 days, deprived of air, food and water. The suspence lies in not knowing exactly how they became stuck in the hole and who's to blame for their dire situation. The plot structure is based around Lizzy's escape, while she continues to have flashbacks of the event itself. However, different flashbacks occur at different stages of the film, which leaves the viewer never really knowing the exact truth until the end. If you've watched your fare share of suspence type mystery thrillers, then you should be able to sum this movie up pretty quickly and be able to guess basically what's going on. The plot and plot structure arn't terribly original and I never really found myself becomming attached or captivated by what was going on. The film lacks character development and you never really become attached to the characters to the point were you intensely care what's happening to them. Thora Birch's performance is dissapointing and not terribly convincing. She's good, but no where near her brilliance when you compare this performance to her roles in American Beauty and Ghost World. The Hole is overall dissapointing and never really draws you in like a good mystery thriller will. I give it 6/10.

A terribly dull movie - boring, repetitive, and irrelevant. It had some interesting characters, but never quite uses them to their full extent. The worst thing is that you simply cannot bring yourself to care about what's going on, and it's you and the other viewers who are stuck in a hole until this ends, hoping it will get better and make up for the time you've already spent. If you enjoyed Disturbing Behavior you might like this, otherwise stay away.

Do yourself a favour - just read the spoilers and don't waste your time on this film... I've always searched for a reason as to why I'm afflicted by male pattern baldness. At first I thought it was having to work with the public for years, and then I put it down to the polluted air in Glasgow or maybe the far fetched idea that it was hereditary. Now I think I've found the answer: I'm going bald due to having to sit through crap like this for years on end in pursuit of a decent horror picture. First off, we have a setting that most of us can relate to: an upper class private school in England. As everyone knows most of the population of Britain attends these types of school, although the one I went to must have been needing a bit of an overhaul as there was a fight every five minutes, all the girls were pregnant, and when we finished school the teachers took us outside, beat the crap out of us and told us never to come back. Moron McScream (Custardpants McGhee) turns up traumatised after some ordeal and phones 911 (in Britain!) and screams down the phone. Turns out she's been trapped in a disused bunker with three of her mates and SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED. It's up to a psychologist to find out what's happened while the police do crosswords. So it's a kind of backstory type film we're dealing with here. Y'see Moron has a crush on Chugnut(played by James Dogsdober), an American Tom Cruise lookalike who we immediately hate. However, Chugnut isn't interested in her, and would prefer to hang around with his best mate Tamponboy(Dangleberry Skidmark, who looks exactly like the kind of person who would attend this kind of school - he's posh, skinny, blonde, goofy, and looks like a relation to the Philips family). Somehow Keira Skinnyposh is involved in this somehow somehow somehow too, but I need not go into details or anything. It's up to DJ Jazzmag to sort out a little party in a bunker somewhere near the school that he's inexplicably found. Once inside, he locks them in and they panic and then after three days he let's them out again - or does he? Because there's three bodies down there, and even though Moron has just told the psychologist that they were let out, she's lying. However, the psychologist doesn't say anything because that would affect the plot. In the meantime DJ Jazzmag is arrested and does his best to ensure that the audience will destroy their televisions rather than sit through anymore of this contrived rubbish. In between screaming in a really annoying voice he says that Moron and Skinnyposh were pure slags man and that they all went down there to get stoned and fornicate and pick their noses and no one believes him. Thankfully I think I blacked out at some point because DJ Jazzmag turns up at Moron's house and all of a sudden the psychologist and Moron are back in the bunker and Moron is confessing everything FOR NO REASON AT ALL. She wanted to get into Chugnut's pants when they were all wasted but Tamponboy and Chugnut both went for Skinnyposh so naturally Moron goes radge and locks everyone in until she and Chugnut are in love. By this time Skinnyposh has died of Bolemia or something and Chugnut has killed Tamponboy for hiding coca-cola. When Chugnut finds out that Moron has had a key all along he goes and gets himself killed accidentally but Moron thinks that's okay because now he can't do the dirty on her. Naturally Moron changes her tune when the cops turn up and says that the psychologist was going to hurt her. Why confess anyway...then? Why do anything? Why do the cops believe everything she says? Why was there only two killings? Where's the slaughter promised in the trailer? Who is this film aiming for anyway? Absolute rubbish. Utter crap. Mince. Puke. Garbage. No gore, no suspense, a twist people can see a mile off. Even what I suppose would be the target audience (teenagers with no social life) would be put off by this.

One big damn mess... I was duped into believing this to be a horror film but it is just a dumb mystery psycho-drama with plenty of bad acting, predictable plot development, and an absolutely absurd premise that hasn't got an iota of credibility or realism to it. Birch organizes a "hole" excursion so she can starve everyone to death in order to make a guy fall in love with her?!! What a load of crap. What's worse, the entire British police force and its detectives and psychologists can't figure the mystery out, and are deceived by a half-crazed teen who hasn't eaten or drank much for a fortnight! Can you spell "DUMB"? This whole teen horror/slasher/mystery genre just keeps digging down to new lows. At least De Palma's and Hitchcock's nonsense can occasionally be entertaining, whereas these kinds of films have no value whatsoever.

The first trailer for this film showed to be a gruelling film about humans trapped in a dark, confined space, slowly withering away. The second trailer pitched this movie as some sort of repellent formulaic teen horror film. It was the first trailer that had been touted since last autumn in the UK that intrigued me enough to see it. Having watched the film I was disappointed as the film failed to deliver what had been promised in either trailer. What I saw was a bland movie that seemingly doesn't know what it's target demographic is. I am assuming that it wanted to be a psychological horror, but the film is so lightweight that it appears to have been written with twelve-year-olds in mind – which isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, the film is visually aimed at adults, with sex, full frontal nudity, nasty violence and drug use. Thus the film is torn between the two camps; the writing is too simple for adults but the adult material will stop kids seeing it. Essentially the story is that these toffs at a private boarding school in England would rather spend three days in an old underground World War Two bunker (the titular ‘Hole') than go to Wales on a school trip. Everything is engineered so that the school assumes that they have gone home for the duration whilst their parents think that they have actually gone to Wales. In other words, nobody knows where they are there. Ultimately the events unfold and they end up stuck in the Hole and proceed to go stir crazy. My biggest hang up is the presence of Thora Birch. Firstly her twee English accent is all over the place. They should have just let her speak with her natural accent, as it would have been less of a distraction. Maybe as an Englishman this is a stick that I can unfairly beat her with and perhaps overseas no one will notice, but for me it was an unwelcome distraction (especially when there are many young British actresses who would've done a better job). Secondly she brings NOTHING to the movie. The other members of the young cast are relative unknowns and act her off the screen. They all give believable reputations of stuck up self-centred kids and the effects of human physical and mental degradation. I assume that Ms. Birch was brought in to add ‘international appeal' but she stifles and flounders around with her leading role, unable to rise to the challenge of her co-stars. Before you all assume that I'm bashing her because she's American think again because young American actor Desmond Harrington who plays Mike Steel, is the best thing about this movie.

Boring, awful, silly, poorly cast. "I killed my best friend for a Coke" was probably the line of the movie, and that's not saying much. I wouldn't recommend this movie to my worst enemy. It boggles my mind that someone with a bankroll actually produced this film and thought it was a good idea to do so.

The Hole begins slowly and very standardly, but unlike most genre films, it picks up pace after 40 minutes then accelerates towards a smashing ending. Well okay, the ending itself wasn't a great surprise, but I found it satisfying in a B-grade kind of way. The premise of Hole is pretty mundane. The idea of a group of teenagers going into an old abandoned building or structure for a lark is a stock standard story opener for hundreds of B-grade horror flicks. But then Hole becomes interesting by the re-telling of events from different characters' individual points of view in a manner reminiscent of the 1950 British gem ‘The Woman in Question'. Just who is telling the truth? The final third of Hole rockets along and the film becomes genuinely frightening. I was especially impressed with the way repercussion of actions and in-actions are graphically shown and not glossed over as so many genre films have a habit of doing. Hole is not a great film. The acting from the five teenagers is a cut above average, but the direction is pretty heavy handed and not very imaginative. Overall I found Hole a nicely satisfying and genuinely frightening B-grade experience which proves the old adage that says the worst monsters are human beings. It also shows that modern thriller/horror genre films doesn't always have to rely on lashings of special effects and supernaturalism to tell a story effectively. 6/10