Catacombs Director: T. Coker and D. Elliot
Most tourists walking around Paris aren't aware of the spooky catacombs below their feet. I'd certainly never heard of them. The horror film "Catacombs" claims to be "based on a true story" and takes place in that labyrinthine underworld, but the film as a whole is horribly predictable.
Victoria (Shannyn Sossaman) is a young, nervous wreck of a woman who comes to Paris to see her bad-girl sister Karolina (Alecia Moore, aka P!nk) who is in Paris as a graduate student. Victoria is hardly off the plane when her sister drags her to an illicit rave in the catacombs. As they go through the gates to get to the party, the nyctophobic visitor isn't too thrilled to find that she has to carry a flashlight just to see where she is going.
The film's audience is invited to join the curious mix of Gothic and club culture scene and witness hundreds of young people jump up and down to live music, drinking alcohol and swimming nude in the tunnel's natural springs. They swap stories about how the place is possessed by a devil, claiming that a cult sect raised a child on raw meat, locked him in chains and forced him to wear an ugly mask until he turned into a murdering monster. And guess what? It turns out to be true.
After a while the French police crash the party and everyone scatters. In all the confusion Victoria hits her head on a rock, passes out and wakes up to find herself all alone in those spooky, skull-filled tunnels with only a flashlight for guidance.
We can all feel lonely and afraid at times, and the directors make good use of the claustrophobic atmosphere to crank up the nervous tension and to show her mental and physical journey throughout the underground tunnels. Of course, it wouldn't be a scary movie without our heroine coming across countless dead ends, bats, mice and a murdering monster. Or is the villain only her inner fears?
I'm not sure if anyone has ever really got lost in the catacombs of Paris, but if I were in Victoria's shoes, common sense would have told me to wait by the entranceway until someone or other came along. But as I waited for her to find her way out of the labyrinth, I was sorely tempted to liberate myself by walking out of the movie theater.
Now showing in Latvia and Lithuania.
