Not as bad as some; not as good as it could have been

Rating: 4/10 (17 February 2006)

I caught this one on a whim and a few spare hours between shifts at work.
I could have chosen better.
From the random bits of hype I'd read or heard, I gathered the film would have some dark, underground edge to it. Guess I gathered wrong. A step up from "Cabin Fever," yes. Still full of "oh, c'mons!" like when these three boneheads ingest unknown chemicals at a nightclub at the behest of these two bimbos they've barely met, pun intended. Or when our hero blithely runs down three of his antagonists in an audience paroxysm of righteous retribution, including backing up to finish off the one he somehow didn't kill outright, and manages to get away scot free.
It's not nearly as frightening as it could have been, because there's little sympathy built for the three ostensible protagonists. They pretty much blunder drunkenly into the web of torture awaiting them without ever having revealed much in the way of a redeeming trait.
Still, they don't deserve what they get, do they? Well, maybe not, but at any rate, the cinematography is very good, the acting gets better as the film moves along, and there's plenty of gore for the splatterhound. If the storytelling had been more artfully crafted, I might have given this a better rating. This one just played like a bad fairy tale.