DVD: “Cube”
By stephanie - Monday, April 3rd, 2006
This 1997 low-budget Canadian flick has a few good things going for it: A creepy setting (the cube, of course), and some horrific scares along the way.
The premise: A group of people wake up, confused and clueless, in a futuristic prison shaped like a cube, which is, in reality, a cube of cubes. The film follows their attempts at escape. Of course, each new cube they enter could either possibly lead to freedom or a gory death trap.
What makes the film work is its lack of information, and part of the fun is seeing the mystery unfold along the way. There are also some genuinely tense edge-of-your-seat moments as well.
Unfortunately, the acting isn’t so hot (despite the appearance of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Nicole deBoer) and some of the plotting gets ridiculous at the end, leaving one feeling somewhat unsatiated. It’s also quite obvious that the actors spent the entire film in the same darn cube (they just lit it up differently to make it look like new cubes), though that’s a minor nitpick.
This is the first in a trilogy; I hear the second one is so-so but the third wraps up the cube mystery nicely. More on that when I get around to placing these little gems in my film queue.