Cube Review

By: Michael Lee

Starring: Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, David Hewlett
Year: 1997

Cube. Where do I begin with Cube? This movie had so much potential. So much! You lock 7 people in a giant cube shaped death trap, divided into over 17000 rooms, 2/3 of which are booby trapped... You really can't go wrong with a premise like that. But here's the catch, in a movie about said death traps the key is to ACTUALLY USE THE F*CKING TRAPS OF DEATH! Out of the seven people in this movie, only one lives, but out of the six less fortunate beings two die by traps!!! The others have the rather lame fates of falling, being stabbed by other prisoners, or well uh... Getting crushed between rooms, which isn't as cool as it sounds when u could easily have seen them being stabbed in the face with about 5,000 spikes in another room.

So let's try to make sense of the story. For some unknown reason, 7 people (a doctor, an ex-con, an architect, a cop, a student, a guy whose sole purpose is to become trap fodder within the first two minutes of the movie, and the rain man) are all locked in the giant cube of death I mentioned earlier. Inside this cube are much smaller cubes each serving as a room that either leads you to safety or cuts/maims/burns/stabs you to death. These rooms are assigned coordinates since they are constantly moving around inside the bigger cube. Using these coordinates, you can tell if a room is trapped or not and you can use them to determine which room will end up where over time. The point to all this is to survive long enough to find the "bridge" or the room that connects the giant cube to the outside world. Did you get all that? Essentially, it's what happens when somebody f*cking around with a Rubik's Cube says "I can make a horror movie out of this". Over time the heroes and the villains of this movie switch out, which is something I actually praise. By the end of the movie, the guy you thought was the hero is now the villain and vise versa. Once in a while another character will seem to take the leadership role once the previous leader becomes incompetent, only to suffer a miserable fall or stab at the hands of another incompetent prisoner (while there's a f*cking acid trap two rooms away! So much potential ruined on the stupid character development!) by the end of this movie you find out very little about the actual Cube, similar to the "Cloverfield" monster, and most people online claim that was the one thing they hated about this movie... I actually kind of liked that. But it didn't make up for the lack of creative deaths, so f*ck it!

5. That's what I'm going to give it. The next time someone says "F*ck "Saw", "Cube" was the original booby trap inspired horror movie!" punch them in their f*cking face. "Saw" was creative with their deaths, and obviously no true horror fan would take character development over creative deaths. This Is why "Friday the 13th" succeeds and "Cube" is square. (Get it? Cube, square. Haha... F*ck you, it's funny.)

 

5 out of 10 Nerdism Nerds.