Movie Review: ‘Elevator Game’
I have stated time and again that Shudder is a true gem of a streaming services. Beyond the classics of horror it also provides a venue for new small-budget scary flicks to find an audience. This has allowed truly incredible films like Skinamarink and Terrified to become recent genre favorites. But with the good comes the not-so-good as we have with the new film Elevator Game.
A group running an online series testing urban legends takes the challenge of the “Elevator Game” at the behest of their new member. The rule of the game are to ride the elevator of an office building in a pattern to earn the wrath of the “5th Floor Woman” a supernatural being who will “tear apart” those she haunts. As you can guess she begins terrorizing these teens who dared ride her lift.
This is the kind of movie that made me feel like a grumpy old-head thanks to the characters of this flick being “influencers” or “internet personalities” or whatever they are immediately making me dislike every single one of them. Any hope of them winning me over by being dynamic is pretty much tossed out the window because they are all, dull, unintelligent, irritating, cookie-cutter people which makes this movie even worse. From the start of Elevator Games we are blatantly told what roles they fill character-wise from “tech girl” to “nerd researcher” and those are the roles they stick to without growth or variation. They may have names, but it is clear that learning them takes more effort than most would be willing to exert.
Unlike most other genres, horror grants filmmakers a handicap that even if they fail in the character-work they can still make an entertaining movie by either delving hard into the scares or hard into the cheese. Sadly Elevator Game does neither, director Rebekah McKendry puts little to no effort in creating anything scary or suspenseful but she also takes it things far more seriously than they deserve. We already do not care if anything horrible happens to the protagonists of this film, but this is amplified by the fact the kills are uncreative and the 5th Floor Woman herself is not a particularly frightening monster thanks to amateurish make-up and the vague generic nature of the threat she poses. The cinematography stands out in that the movie strangely lit brightly which does nothing by the way of creating anything spooky or atmospheric.
If you have anyone in your life who simply wants a basic and unimaginative horror movie, you can confidently show them Elevator Game and no it will fill that void in their life. If you are a normal person, rest assured Shudder has plenty of excellent movies to choose from instead of this one. So go watch one of those instead, like 2017’s nightmarish masterpiece Terrified which I can not recommend enough. You have options, so do not be afraid to use them.
