Steel Trap

Year of Release: 2007
Genre:  Horror / Thriller
IMDB Rating: 4.5 / 10
Level of Awful: Low
Breast-O-Meter: 0 / 5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

How to describe this movie? The best thing to do is imagine the first Saw movie. Remember when you watched it and had absolutely no clue what was going on right up until the very end but you were intrigued all the way through and stunned by how clever it was when it finished? Right, now take out the part with the cleverness and how stunned you were and essentially you have Steel Trap in a nutshell. The movie leans primarily on the Saw franchise in its layout with the occasional reference to things like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Carrie to spice things up and a twist in the tale that’s trying to be something along the lines of Scream. The problem comes in when it doesn’t deliver on the Saw premise like it was trying to, and the audience is left (more than a little bit) disappointed.

Oh sure, it looks perfectly safe.

Let me set the scene: it’s New Year’s eve, the countdown is about to begin and the crowd is kinda pumping; it’s here we find our cast of completely unlikable characters. First off we have Nicole, a cold bitch, and her boyfriend Robert, an asshole to start off with who only gets worse as the movie progresses. Then there’s Amber, a slut of note who looks a little bit like Ke$ha before the night gets going, and her latest lay Adam (who Nicole kissed a few moments ago so that Robert would pay more attention to her). Our final three characters are Kathy, a semi-celebrity chef that resembles Rachel Ray on a wild cocaine binge, Wade, the singer for the band that was playing Auld Lang Syne, and Pamela, a woman trying to leech off Kathy’s career and who’s as relentless as a Jack Russel with a tennis ball. Anyway the party was getting dull and all of them received a text message saying that another party’s going on downstairs and that they’ve been invited. Since the entire building’s abandoned and there can’t be too many parties going on in it the logical conclusion they all arrive at is that this other party must be very VIP, so they rush on as fast as their drunken (but sober) legs will carry them.

Yeah, I've thought of doing this when my sinuses act up.

Now one would think, given the odd situation our friends find themselves in, that they may pause for a moment and ponder how strong the chances of a children’s themed VIP party taking place in an abandoned building on New Year’s eve with just the 7 of them really are. Maybe I’m just not as hardcore as these people are, but it seems a little suspicious. Undeterred they gather round the little table with all its lovely balloons and wait for the rest of the guests to arrive, talking comfortably amongst themselves about the place cards that have been laid out for each of them with adoring pet names like ‘heartless’, ‘pig’ and ‘two faced’. When all 5 of the invited guests have arrived (Robert and Melanie are tag-alongs) they all decide to eat some of the delectable cupcakes that have been laid out for them by their gracious host who has yet to arrive. Upon eating the little cakes they find a paper doily underneath with a nursery rhyme that gives them a clue as to what they should do next. Unleashing their inner children the group is delighted to be involved in a scavenger hunt and prance off to look for their next clue. They’re so busy prancing that they don’t notice the man in the shiny mask with a hook hiding in the curtains staring at them and filming their every move…

Fuck off Bloody Mary, go find your own bad movie!

Anyone with two brain cells to rub together might have begun to think at this point that something isn’t quite right with this party, but even when they come across a rotting pig’s head with their next clue the only person who seems even mildly disturbed is Nicole. The group might have been more inclined to follow her advice had they seen Adam being attacked, drugged and having his lips sown shut by the man in the weird mask, but sadly they were too busy looking for the next clue at the time. They finally have some sense knocked into them a little bit later when they come across Adam’s body that’s been tied to the roof, trussed up like a pig and with a hook lodged in him. They now need to try and find a way out but since all of the exits have been booby-trapped and they are completely incapable of functioning as a unit more and more of them are picked off. I would also like to add that, despite this movie being a part of the Dimension Extreme family, there’s nothing particularly extreme about how they are killed. Who will survive? What are the killer’s motivations? Why the odd pet names on the place cards? All this and more with every edition of Steel Trap, available in stores now!

It’s not that I would recommend you don’t watch this movie, it’s just that it’s so middle of the road and such a weak impersonation of so many other movies that the only time I think you should watch it is when you’ve watched everything else, read every book in the house, it’s the middle of winter, it’s raining and your ill.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• It can be very hard to find the strength to carry on when you have no one to kiss you at midnight on New year’s Eve.
• Rolling over and spanking someone is a great way to deal with nightmares.
• Nothing turns a person into a celebrity like a cooking and crafts show does.
• People are drawn to creepy parties like moths to a flame.
• No game that starts with a rotting pig’s head ends with a giant teddy bear.
• When your phone says ‘Signal Blocked’ it often means that someone’s blocked the signal.
• When someone’s trying to kill you in a clever way it’s a great time to be passive aggressive with your boyfriend.
• When a couple’s being stalked by a killer an argument regarding vaginas is bound to break out.

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