IRON DOORS

IRON DOORS

IRON DOORS is a German film originally released in 3d back in 2010. Directed by Stephen Manual, it promised to be an intense and original thriller that would flex my brain a little. Due to my ancestry, I am admittedly a little biased toward anything originating from Germany, so with the above factors in mind, the movie couldn’t fail to impress me … could it?

Mark (Axel Wedekind) wakes up in a concrete room, devoid of windows but crudely illuminated with a fluorescent tube light. Through a stinker of a hangover, he steadily regains some semblance of consciousness only to realise his companions are merely a circular steel reinforced vault door, a dead rat and a metal locker.

The locker and vault door share similarities in as much that they are both locked tight. Even though Mark assumes it’s some form of practical joke played by his drinking buddy Fletcher, his patience soon begins to run out. Scanning the walls for a camera proves fruitless as do his announcements to his imprisoning jester that ok I have been had, now let me the fuck out!

This carries on into a second day when it suddenly dawns on him there is a solitary key lodged among the growing collection of dead flies in the cylindrical lights casing overhead. Once the key liberated from the lights metal cage, Mark is relieved that it actually fits the metal locker. Its contents are a gas canister that, when the peripheral parts are assembled, can produce an intense flame. A canister of oxygen along with a hammer and chisel complete the tools at his disposal which have presumably been provided to entice him into devising an escape route.

With his energy drained, he is forced to drink his own urine after pissing in his shoe while his only source of nourishment appears to be the multiplying maggots growing on the rat. (Personally I would have barbequed the rat with the aforementioned flame but then again I have been overexposed to many of South London’s dodgy fast food establishments in my formative years!)

He chisels, he hammers, he melts the steel reinforcements and eventually fashions a hole big enough to house his body. Once through, he discovers not only a similar room but another victim, an African lady (Rungano Nyoni), who also appears to be a player in someone’s sick game…

Oh dear where do we start? A logical place would be the MENU screen I guess. The audio options afforded the viewer the preference of STEREO and 5.1. Pity they didn’t include the much sought after ‘IN SYNCH" choice! The audio was SO out of synch I honestly thought it was laughably poor dubbing at first.

I tested the disc on my laptop AND another DVD player but all three sources gave the same audio mismatch rendering the disc pretty unwatchable. Considering the screener came housed in a proper case and NOT just a ‘white label’ disc only, I would advise you guys give this one a wide berth to be honest.

Even if the audio had been harmonized, I doubt very much it would have saved this quite abysmal effort. When you have a cast of two, you rely on the performances. I loved a movie called THE HIDE which, due to the quality of the acting, was absorbing from start to finish, despite there being just a couple of cast members. Wedekind, not helped by a script laden with mundane wisecracks and dialogue such as "Motherfucking cock sucking sons of motherfuckers...", became rather irritating after just a few minutes.

Moving on to his partner in incarceration and I think it’s fair to assume IRON DOORS won’t figure in the next ‘Women in Horror Recognition Month’. My rationale for this supposition is the fact that Deka, the African lady, was probably the most disgracefully useless female I have EVER witnessed in a movie. Despite Mark being a step away from death, she still didn’t have the aptitude to work a hammer and chisel leaving it to the near dead Mark. Even when Deka did eventually grasp the concept (after about 24 hours in the narrative timeline) she still managed to miss the fucking chisel and inflict further pain on Mark by smashing his hand that was holding the chisel for her! (And the wife always tells me MEN can’t multitask...!) It really was blatantly pathetic and considering I am not one to get embroiled in ‘sexist’ debates online or otherwise, I couldn’t help but find her role positively offensive to my intelligence never mind the fairer sex.

Despite running at 80 minutes, the movie still seemed very protracted. I even tried to convince myself it would have worked better as a short movie but the insult of a conclusion put paid to that. Put another way, had Mark of woken up in his own bed after the 3 day ordeal being rendered "all a dream" I doubt it could have been worse.

In summary the IRON DOORS DVD is a very poor film with unacceptable synch issues and misleading packaging. On the plus side the picture quality was very sharp and the maggot wiggling in the dead rat’s eye socket was quite amusing.

Review by Marc Lissenburg


 
Released by Jinga Films
Region 1 - NTSC
Not Rated
Extras :
see main review
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