The Hole

Plot synopsis:
17-year-old Dane Thompson, his 10-year-old brother Lucas, and their mother, Susan, move from Brooklyn to the quiet town of Bensenville where Dane and Lucas befriend their next door neighbor, Julie. While exploring their new home, Dane and Lucas discover a trapdoor with several locks along each side in the basement. Opening the trapdoor reveals a hole which appears to be bottomless.
Over the next few days, each child experiences strange events. Lucas, having a fear of clowns, discovers a jester puppet on his bed, as well as other locations, as if it is following him. Julie begins to see an injured girl who bleeds from her eyes. Dane starts to see shadowy figures of a large man. Eventually, all three witness the injured girl together at the boys' home where they follow her to the basement and watch as she crawls into the hole.
Julie suggests they seek help from the previous owner of the house, Creepy Carl, who now lives in an abandoned glove factory surrounded by hundreds of lights and lamps. When the kids tell him that they have opened the hole, he berates them for releasing the evil inside stating that it will come for them and kill Dane. Later that night, Carl is seen scribbling in a sketchbook, almost blacking out entire pages. Carl screams, "I'm not done yet!" as the light bulbs around him pop.
The sketchbook turns out to belong to Dane, who returns to the factory to retrieve it. He finds his sketchbook in the darkness; Creepy Carl is gone. Julie decides to get the group relaxed and throws a pool party. While under the water, Dane sees a shadowy figure of a giant man standing above. Once out of the pool, he notices a trail of muddy footprints which he and Julie follow, leaving Lucas alone in the pool. They hear Julie's pet dog, Charlie, barking and return to see Lucas drowning. Lucas tells them that the jester puppet had pulled him under.
Later that night, while Lucas is asleep, Dane sees a hand-shaped bruise on Lucas' leg. He discovers that it is identical to a hand that Creepy Carl had drawn in the sketchbook. As he flips through the sketchbook, he realizes that each page is a puzzle piece. While working on the puzzle, Dane hears someone whistling. When he walks into the kitchen, he sees an envelope addressed to him from the New Jersey State Penitentiary. A note inside reads 'HELLO BOY'. He rushes upstairs to Lucas and tells him that someone is in the house. While Dane investigates, Lucas meets a police officer standing at the bottom of the stairs. The officer shows Lucas a picture of two little girls and asks if he has seen one of them and points to the girl whom Julie first encountered. The police officer leaves the picture with Lucas and turns to leave revealing the back of his head is missing. Lucas fetches Dane and the pair watch the cop return to the basement and climb into the hole.
Next door, the girl then appears in Julie's room. Julie climbs out of her window and meets the boys where she reveals to Dane that she and her best friend Annie were playing on the tracks of an old roller coaster which resulted in an accident where Annie fell to her death. In an attempt to help Julie, a police officer had also fallen and was killed. She decides to return to the amusement park where the accident occurred stating "I know what I need to do now." Dane goes after her telling Lucas to stay at home.
Julie finds her friend sitting on the same spot from which she fell. After Julie helps Annie understand that she had tried to save her, Annie disappears and is pleased that Julie is no longer scared. Meanwhile, Lucas hears Dane calling him to the basement. Confused, he follows the voice to discover the jester puppet mimicking Dane's voice. The puppet attacks Lucas but is outwitted and eventually destroyed. Dane and Julie return and Lucas announces that he is no longer afraid of clowns. Dane then tells them of a theory that once you look into the hole it somehow knows you and creates whatever you are afraid of. When asked what he's afraid of, Dane replies that he is not afraid of anything.
Julie then invites Dane and Lucas to stay at her place for the night. As Lucas is gathering his things, Dane shows Julie the puzzle he had been working on. They solve the puzzle together and see a boy being grabbed by a giant man. Dane rushes upstairs to find that Lucas is gone. Dane finally reveals that he is afraid of his father, who had abused the entire family and is now in prison. Realizing that his father has taken Lucas into the hole, Dane jumps into the hole as well.
Dane finds Lucas hiding in the closet of a twisted version of a home. Their father, who has become a giant, discovers them and starts to break through the door. They turn around and discover the shelving seems to be a ladder. Dane tells Lucas to start climbing. Dane starts to follow, when his father drags him back down. As Dane fights him off, the giant father slowly returns to his actual size as Dane starts to confront his fear, seeing him for what he really is. Their surroundings begin to crumble and the floor falls away leaving Dane and his father trapped on an island under a ceiling fan. Having taken his father's belt, Dane pulls himself onto the fan and gives the crumbling floor one final blow with the belt buckle causing the floor to break apart and the father to fall.
Dane emerges from the hole where Julie and Lucas are waiting. They close the hole, just as their mother comes down to the basement. She sees the trapdoor and opens it, revealing a shallow crawl space below. As the group heads upstairs, Lucas asks his mom if she is afraid of anything. She replies that she was afraid of a monster under her bed when she was a little girl. Lucas says, "Uh oh," as the trapdoor blows opens again revealing the darkness has returned.

Tags: insanity, prank, flashback

Review:
I am assuming that it wanted to be a psychological horror, but the film is so lightweight that it appears to have been written with twelve-year-olds in mind  which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I assume that Ms. Birch was brought in to add international appeal' but she stifles and flounders around with her leading role, unable to rise to the challenge of her co-stars.Before you all assume that I'm bashing her because she's American think again because young American actor Desmond Harrington who plays Mike Steel, is the best thing about this movie..
The movie concerns a bunch of adolescents formed by Thora Birch , Desmond Harrington , Kiera Knightley and others who stake to shelter in a bunker .They're closed up and then terrible events originate .Although the happening develops itself in locked place the film is not tiring .The yarn mingles emotions , violence , shocks , thriller , the suspense doesn't fail and that's why it's bemusing and isn't boring .Acting by Thora Birch is awesome , she was paid a high salary due to her recent acclaimed role in American Beauty (1998) .
And Desmond Harrington (Ghost ship) is cool .The film has relation to last group of English movies developed in shut and strange stages as the Bunkers or trenches , for example : ¨Deathwatch¨ and ¨the Bunker¨.The movie has a pretty twisted plot and the final storyline has extraordinary and fascinating surprises.
If you have seen the trailers (or read some of the reviews), you would be forgiven of thinking of this film as a dark and disturbing thriller, unfortunately, this is not the case.The acting is first rate from the leading five, though Embeth Davidtz, an experienced actress, is confined to a character with little scope for the talents she has displayed in previous films, and I find it disappointing that her acting skills were curtailed by such a restrictive screenplay.And herein lies the main problem for this film.
This film has none of the twists and turns you would expect from a thriller, an ending that is at once unconvincing, predictable, and weak, and plot holes you could drive a bus through.Director, Nick Hamm, shows great promise as this film is very well put together, and he certainly gets the best from the main four actors.
The Hole isn't that bad a film, its just that it lacks the components which a good thriller/suspence/mystery should have.The Hole, starring Thora Birch, is a suspence/mystery and is about a group of high-school teenagers who become stuck in an old, World War 2 tunnel, called 'the hole'.
However, different flashbacks occur at different stages of the film, which leaves the viewer never really knowing the exact truth until the end.If you've watched your fare share of suspence type mystery thrillers, then you should be able to sum this movie up pretty quickly and be able to guess basically what's going on.
This is probably the best teen horror movie I've ever seen; it is really well made, and the screen play really gives the young actors (among others Keira Knightley who is very good) something to work with.
The worst thing is that you simply cannot bring yourself to care about what's going on, and it's you and the other viewers who are stuck in a hole until this ends, hoping it will get better and make up for the time you've already spent.
[Not that I'm knocking her talent, but a few more days with the accent coach would have improved her chances of passing off as an English schoolgirl.] Next time hire a script editor -- someone who can tell you "Hey, you know, if you go to all the trouble of having the bad girl successfully pin the crime on the school geek, it doesn't really make sense for her to make a full confession immediately after." As for the hole, it's what this movie needs: six down and three across, with the earth firmly stamped down on top of it..
The Hole is a film that takes me back to many years ago when i was a child sitting up late at night and watching the Hammer house Of Horror movies which used to scare the hell out of me but as an adult found rather tame.
Like Cube, the Hole fails in making the characters fascinating or deep, making it difficult for this reviewer to care what happens to them (not that we didn't have a pretty good idea of who not to get attached to after the opening sequence).
All in all, it is tempting to say that this film had the look and feel of a production for British TV, but with shows like Cracker (or even UltraViolet), that would hardly seem fair.On a less serious note, rather than to discuss some plot-holes that cannot be discussed without spoiling, I'll just seize the chance to say that how Invisible Eyebrow Girl found the Oasis Clone that much more attractive than the Morrissey Clone is beyond me -- he had less of a hairdo going into the hole than the others did on their way out.
And there are moments in the film that are genuinely disturbing, for example when we see Liz beside her vomiting best friend, ignoring her totally, preferring to obsess about Mike - her teenage fantasy incarnate.Technically, the film is superb, and fragmented fast shots of the bodies and effective lighting and mise-en-scene in the Hole itself are brilliant, but everything set in the present is fairly terrible, mostly due to dubious acting and underdeveloped script work.
The contrived atmosphere of the first fifty minutes is representative of Liz's tale itself - false, and when we do see the account as it happened, it is shocking and tense (although the cheesy funeral scene is fairly diabolical).The biggest problem around the film is the fact that the characters, even Liz, are underdeveloped and the script and issues (eg that of identity, ie belonging - "The be popular at (name of high school), you have to be either..." said by both Martin and Liz) are too.
Her obession is a fantastic premise for a film and its context in the hole is excellent but then it is damaged by a throw away attitude to making decent psychological thrillers - in this case, the teen horror genre was too much of an influence (although the grissly death scenes were very effective).An excellent idea, but seriously underdeveloped, especially when placed in a market with peers such as Cube, with a lower budget and totally unknown actors (I'm sorry, Thora, I'm sorry!!)which manages to be shocking, timeless and tense.Watch it, it's good.
The claustrophobia of being trapped in an underground bunker rarely comes across and the impression I got from the trailer turned out to be false.I didn't expect a huge amount from this movie..It was one of those, much like "The Gift", where I thought it might be good and it might be bad, hopefully interesting..
These are probably the 2 main weaknesses of this movie.Nevertheless, I thought it wasn't a bad film, though they could've done a better job on building the suspense....
To my discredit, I didn't think that much of it, but still kept flicking back to it from something else I was also half-watching, BUT my views are still valid despite missing out on all the plot developments, as they are much more fundamental.Firstly, I didn't really know who Thora Birch was, but guessed very quickly that she is American.
Gwyneth Paltrow as Queen Elizabeth yes; Renee Zellwigger as Bridget Jones sort of; Thora Birch as an English public school girl no.Secondly, as a suspense thriller where you are supposed to be shocked at whodunit, how then did I, watching only episodic sections, manage to guess within minutes who was almost certainly the guilty party?
Thora Birch is a fantastic actress, but here she plays the troubled schoolgirl with very little originality, unlike her brilliant performance in Ghost World, and her accent always reverts to American at the really intense moments (which does add some humour to keep interest levels up).The behaviour of the characters is irritating and stereotypical to say the least and the idea that four people would want to spend a few days down a (very dull) hole is almost laughable..
I tried to enjoy the movie like the psychological thriller it was, but unfortunately I found myself being totally careless to it's plot, it's actors and so on.
Do directors honestly think that teenagers really act in such a way?It's not fair to level the films failure at something as trivial as bad accents but while, on paper, the plot is great, Nick Hamm simply fails to achieve the success that the novel does.
To recap: terrible acting (- especially on Ms. Birch's behalf), annoying 'middle-class' teen characterisation (- it tended to get under my skin), unstimulating plot (- it runs more like an extended TV thriller than anything else), thin horror/suspense, and a weak ending.
It comes, it goes, it makes no impact on you whatsoever, just a slight numbing misery and a brief burst of annoyance at how it all turns out.In the end, though The Hole was seen at the time of its release as being a brilliant example of low-budget filmmaking, it suffers from the same problem as most high-concept Hollywood output: it is nothing more than its pitch, and when the film gets past dramatising its pitch (that is, once the setting and characters and McGuffin have been established) the writer and director seem intent on wrapping it all up as quickly as possible..
But, then again, it's not really horror, just like it's not really a teen drama, or slasher film, but something that's a bit of a hybrid of all those genres.It's set in a well-to-do English boarding school where four pupils decide not to go home for half term, but instead to party on down in an abandoned, er, hole - w ell, it's some sort of underground bunker-type-thing where they can lock themselves away from the rest of the world and do all those naughty things that teenagers do.All of this is orchestrated by Liz (Thora Birch, sporting a just about passable English accent).
Four teenagers at a British private school secretly uncover and explore the depths of a sealed underground hole created decades ago as a possible bomb shelter.The film stars Thora Birch, whose headlining credit and highly publicized seven figure salary was attributed to her appearance in "American Beauty".
A teenager with usual hen issues, a boy of every girl's dream, a girl with fiber tablet diet and her boyfriend plan to escape a field-trip by double crossing the parents and school authorities by staking out in an unused war bunker.When the door doesn't budge after three days, they are stuck in "the hole".Narrated by one of the four in a psychological session, the film juggles between reality and lies, at one point the movie goes "usual suspects" on you but that is only the half way and there are other loops to untied.Thora Birch gives a strong performance.
Others have given a decent act but the plot loses its charm towards the end and hence plays coy on the whole movie.One time watch..
Basically, a few students want to ditch a school trip to Wales, and they choose to do so by hiding out in the abandoned bomb shelter that one student already knew of.Now that that's out of the way, I almost with the original plot outline had been true because I think it would have made for a more interesting film.I thought the main characters were well-played, but there really wasn't much attention paid to, or effort required of the obviously supporting ones, who were basically clichés and throwaway.And while there was some suspense in the initial one-third of the picture, and a bit of questioning what actually happened, it's fairly easy to figure out by minute 40.
It's moderately interesting to see what time in the shelter does to a couple of the characters, and what lengths a person might go to to capture the object of his/her affection, but you really have to pay attention to figure out how long they've been in there when certain scenes play out because the film jumps back and forth.In the DVD version, if you go through the deleted scenes, one of them is the lopped-off, "one year later" scene that is basically stolen from the end of "Urban Legend." Ultimately, this is a good time and entertaining for awhile, but fails to surprise, and you're left waiting for it to just wrap itself up.Take care..
The supporting cast performs well and one feels sorry for their victimization.While visually the film is fun to look at, but where plot, story and character development are concerned this gives us almost zip.
The heroine of the story is played by Thora Birch, whose story is told in flashback after she winds up in a hospital and everyone wants to know what has happened.To be frank the only reason I recognized this film is because I had heard on the IMDb Pirates of the Caribbean message board that Keira Knightley appeared naked at the age of 15.
All in all this is nothing special but the performances are actually (surprisingly) pretty good - Birch has a good (fake) British accent and the rest of the cast is at least acceptable.This will probably be more famous years from now because it will be recognized as one of Keira's first movies, but to be honest it really is a pretty worthwhile film..
Knightly is also pretty good as popular good time girl Frankie, and fans of hers will be delighted to know that she gets 'em out for the lads in this one (I couldn't care lessthey're not that impressive!).As the story unfolds, we gradually learn the terrible truth behind the foursome's predicament, and are treated to some quite nasty scenes as food begins to run out, people get ill and tempers start to flare.Not a classic by any stretch of the imagination, The Hole is nevertheless a solidly entertaining film that passes the time quite nicely.
This movie does the same thing, though it admittedly comes to it a different way.We begin Thora Birch climbing out of a hole, and then finding a telephone to scream in.
While this is only my opinion, I think The Hole is a great film.Indeed, like "Cry Wolf", "The Hole" is more of a psychological Thriller than Horror.
The cast give it a good go, Fox, Knightley & Harrington convince as posh kids forced into a life or death situation, while Birch, in spite of dubious accent shifts, carries the movie with ease as the shifty teenager with a potentially dangerous crush on Harrington.Sadly the plotting is very so-so and it's more likely to induce cries of "no, really?" and "well how did that happen?" than any sort of creepy involvement.
The Hole isn't a bad little thriller, but by the time it ends it's hard not to think of how much better it could have been.
I thought the girl looked like Keira Knightley, I had no idea though.It was playing on one of the movie channels and I got bored so I decided to watch it.
This movie was a nice surprise,the cast did a great job and Thora Birch showed she can be a very diverse actress.I will buy this DVD very soon,so I can share it with my friends and get their thought on it.I don't agree that this qualify's as a true horror movie, but the directer does a great job!With the script,and the actors earned their money.Great movie with a lot of good guessing and some on the edge of your seat moments.The American audience has a different view on most English made movies .I think not enough of them make it to the states to be seen!This should have had advertising and a lot of promotion along with a movie premier,with the cast on hand opening night the studio would have made a great deal more money with this one..
While it isn't groundbreaking or a great film, "The Hole" is better than most contemporary teen horror/thrillers.
The acting was quite good unlike most teen flicks and Thora Birch (the little girl from `Patriot Games') was excellent, she succeeds in carrying the movie alone.
The story more or less revolves around her version of events, and after the first 30 minutes, you get the feeling that everything is not what it appears to be.I won't give anything away, but this film isn't essential viewing, but I'd recommend that you do at some time watch it.The main cast of five do well, in what could have been a disaster, but they all hold their roles well.
Liz Dunn (playing Thora Birch) gives as a great performance if you ignore her terrible accent, from her great scream at the beginning to her "evil" look in the final scene.If you ignore "some" of the flaws in the script it still comes out a pretty good psychological horror movie..
'The Hole' looked like an interesting and different thriller, featuring a young and relatively unknown Keira Knightley.
If you are looking for some jump scare, psychological horror stuff or story that a bunch of teenagers get slaughtered during their adventure which is what I thought before watching this film, the hole is likely to disappoint you as it is much more of a drama.
This is a thriller about teenagers with some disturbing scenes and the story revolves around the character starred by Thora Birch.
As a film, 'The Hole' has some good music and a clever final twist (that follows the telegraphed "expected" twist); it also uses (like many other films) actors too old for their characters' years, and the beautiful Thora Birch (whose actually quite good playing English) as the supposedly plain girl.