Get Out While You Can [Review: Escape Room]

Four friends sign up for an escape room challenge - an hour to find the clues and unlock the door. The scenario of this particular escape room is creepy - dim lighting, cracked walls covered in mysterious documents and clues, and a mysterious hooded figure at one end of the room, attached to a very short chain. However, as if all of the existing décor wasn't creepy enough, the curator has recently added a skull-shaped chest, ignoring warnings that it might contain something deeply evil, and failing to warn the players of this. What if one of them turned out to be allergic to evil forces? There'd be grounds for a refund at least. And maybe, just maybe, if you have locked four strangers into a room with an evil entity in a box, this might be a bad time to leave your escape room building altogether and go for a sulk.

Hard-core escapologists may enjoy films such as Cube, Exam or the Saw series - you may find this film a little lightweight, it's definitely on the easy setting. On the off-chance you might actually watch this modest but passable film, I'll avoid further spoilers. However I will take a tip from another blogger, Big D, and analyse the poster/DVD cover a little.

Not bad? Pretty dramatic, nice logo.

Now I'll take you through some elements of the poster.

The chained-up double door with the windows and the scratch marks - never appears in the movie. Looks to me like hospital or laboratory doors, and the movie is not set in either.

The scratch marks on the door suggest that someone is trapped in the room for days or weeks - but the movie takes place over the space of an hour or two. It's common for real-life escape rooms to have a time limit of an hour.

There's a young woman kneeling on the floor, covered by blood, and screaming from pain, terror or both. Without giving too much away, this is true to the film.

There's a creepy fellow standing by the right edge of the poster looking creepy. Again, does feature in the film.

Most interestingly, there are three huge circular saws in the picture, set into gaps in the floor suggesting that they may be able to move along them. They look pretty deadly, the kind of thing Jigsaw might dream up in the Saw movies - in other words a deliberate trap intended to kill players who failed a test of some kind. The film does not feature any circular saws at all, and no similar deliberately designed killer traps - the threat comes from the evil entity that has unknowingly been introduced to the puzzle room.

So I'd just like to say thank you to the cover artist for completely obscuring the actual content of this movie, no doubt deliberately to preserve its precious few moments of genuine horror and suspense unspoiled.