So I’ve been gone for a while, getting all that university business out of the way. But now I’m back! (Waits for applause)...to review more great (...) films!
The Devil’s Tomb is an alright ride, but is almost instantly forgettable – remembered only for average acting and sometimes laughably bad special and physical effects.
I don’t watch too many straight-to-DVD releases, and you can probably guess why: they normally always suck (if they were any good they would come out in the cinema...right?). Coming into Devil’s Tomb I had no idea about its direct to DVD origins, but by the end I had my suspicions, which tells you a little of what you are going to get if you get round to watching this ‘action horror’ flick.
In a sort of Resident Evil meets the Exorcist fashion, Devil’s Tomb follows a group of elite American soldiers headed by Mack (played by Cuba Gooding Jr) who have been tasked to travel to a secret archaeological site (where obviously things have gone horribly wrong, as made clear in the mish-mash of video clips of Ron Perlman saying nonsensical things to the audience) to find a missing scientist, played by Ron Perlman, who is believed to still be alive inside. After a short period of Gooding and his army friends wandering why everyone is diseased and dead we see 90 minutes of possessed Zombies getting shot, weird hallucinations, generic “oh I think I’ll just go off this way on my own because that’s a great idea right?” horror genre deaths, Henry Rollins acting all crazy, some biblical-tie ins, and then credits roll. All of which is carried out with little energy (even Rollins can’t save the film from among generic army banter) and a dashing of poor blood effects and boring sets.
There is an attempt to conceal what is really going on, but the reveal, though perhaps a little unexpected, doesn’t deviate much from the premise of “Yo! Zombies”, apart from that it screws them in a more religious light.
Alongside the main plot, we see a string of flash backs through the eyes of Gooding with him fighting in a nondescript place against nondescript people; at first a thought this was to give some back story to Gooding’s character and the characters of those in his crew but it actually plays more into the main story than I was expecting, albeit in a way that is confused and hence unsatisfying and in some ways seems tacked on to give some melodrama to Gooding’s generic army character. Nor are any of the other things that the film makers attempted to weave into the complex lattice of these deep emotional characters; overall I found it difficult to care about anyone.
Overall then, the plot, though not all that terrible, is horribly derivative and generally rather bland. Obviously such things can sometimes be overlooked if the action is good. Short answer: it isn’t, that too is all rather generic. Sure undead people get shot, army dudes get killed, but not in any way which is surprising or particularly interesting.
Perhaps it could be forgiven some of these trespasses if it was made on a low budget, but apparently it had a budget of $10 million, which leaves me wondering where they spent all their money; it certainly wasn’t on the effects!
In the end then, there isn’t really any reason to watch this, at all. But that said, if you happen to stumble across it on some backwater TV channel in the middle of the night, and have nothing better to do with your time, it will probably hold your interest.
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