Frightfest: Urban Explorer (2011)

A group of urban explorers hear about an amazing site below the surface of Berlin, and make contact with an amateur guide. He tells them that below the surface is this bunker that contains Nazi graffiti/propaganda and that the German authorities did not want the public to see them. Thrilled to see something that others have not, the quartet follows their guide into an underground world beneath a nightclub. Having found the bunker, the guide takes a fall leaving the rest of the group lost underground, much to the joy of the explorers they run into a former border guard who promises to help them, but of course he has other plans on his mind.

I have a real interest in Urban Exploration, so this was one of the must see movies of the Film Four Frightfest, and typically enough when your expectations are high, the results are less than satisfactory. The movies story is fairly predictable during the first portion of the film, as first the group have the fear of being lost with an injured man, then the relief finding help, only to discover that he is not really the sort of help they needed. What follows from there on is rather sadly, tried and tested torture porn filled with cliché and a whole series of questions.

In fairness, we were watching a not quite complete print, in that the movies bad guy talks in German, but the German language subtitle track was missing from the movie, so a lot of the movie for an English speaking audience already had question marks. However there is a limit to how much of the movie you can forgive for this unfortunate flaw. For one audience member I spoke too, the lack of subtitle track added to the movie, not knowing what was being said, built the suspense.

The crux of the problem is time, so much of the movie would occur over a period of time, yet you don’t get the impression that much time in the movie has passed, if the characters occasionally glanced at their watches and you could see time moving on, it would add some reality to the piece. One row in front of me, fellow attendee Sarah pointed out to an engaged group, that an integral part of the plot (which I can’t reveal) would take a period of time to achieve, yet it appears to have happened in a period of about ten minutes.

For me the big problem was with damage, or rather the lack of it. At one point the villain appears to literally have his brains smashed out with a metal girder, the next minute he’s back with only a few marks and a spot of blood, trust me, if someone repeatedly hits you on the head with a girder (granted only a small part) you would have some severe injuries. This combined with one of the leads one minute ability to run, the next minute unable to walk, rolling round on the floor in fact was really, really irritating.

Urban Explorer so quickly turns into a Hostel clone, and I guess the Urban Exploration aspect is new, but everything you see in the movie has been done before, and to be honest a lot better.

For a first time director Andy Fetscher did a really good job, of delivering a polished looking film visually, but there simply was not enough effort put into making it different, and what could have been great, ended up being incredibly poor.