Storage 24 (2012) UKThis movie had two things I usually don't like - one it's an English horror film and two it's a creature feature. I liked Alien and I think I liked Predator (meh) but I'm not much for the creepy crawly type of movie. But this one was surprisingly good. Not great, but decent.
It had problems, most with pacing (most English films are really uneven) and a soap opera-y feel with the people and their relationship problems. It also had the cliche' kind of people - one starts out as a real ass and turns into a hero, one is a great guy who turns into a quivering coward. That's not that original, people.
We start with a military plane falling from the sky in the middle of London. Looking outside of a storage rental business, one sees a car crushed by one of the plane's engines, plus a strange looking transport crate that's broken open. I had problems with that, I'll tell you why in a bit.
The electric grid starts going up and down and the storage building goes into a kind of lockdown, trapping workers and customers inside. And something else. Something - not human. We are to assume that it was the cause of the plane crash, plus what burst out of the crate. Now the crate was kind of small - it looked like it could transport a large dog or something. But when the creature makes its appearance after killing a couple of people offscreen (all we see is their mangled bodies afterward), it's got to be almost seven feet tall and BIG. How the hell did it fit in that crate? Unless it wasn't a transport crate and I got it all wrong. I wouldn't be surprised.
Besides the employees of the business we have two women and one man, one of the woman an ex-girlfriend down there to pack up and get her stuff. Showing up to add to the group is the ex-boyfriend with his best friend to confront her. Like I said, leaning toward the soap opera style.
But they start getting picked off one by one as movies go - monsters don't murder in groups, just individuals, right? It's revealed early that the ex-boyfriend's best friend is now his ex's boyfriend (sheesh) so there's that conflict as well. But they must work together to get out of the building alive.
The monster isn't that original - I mentioned Predator, that's kind of what this creature looked like, at least the head did. It can rip through metal like paper and shreds apart everything it grabs. It's not scared of anything - except one of those horrid yapping wind up dogs, ya know the ones that bark and then take a few steps? It HATED that. Hmm, it had taste after all I guess.
The gore was decent in most places - they had a half-man that not only was alive but managed to grab one of the survivors... uh, no. I applaud the effort at trying to make us jump, but he'd been there a while and being alive, much less able to grab with a firm grip onto someone is not going to happen. Sorry.So as the story goes into the usual run run run hide hide hide crawl crawl crawl oops one more dead kind of pattern, the new boyfriend at first abandons his now ex-best friend, telling the others that he's dead. Well, no, he just ran off without him to save his own skin, the guy turns up still alive. And they make that a really, REALLY dumb pattern to smack you in the face with 'See? See? This new guy is an ass!' Like we couldn't have figured that out. He's out to save himself, screw the people he's with. He next abandons his own new girlfriend, giving the rest the same 'She's dead.' when she actually was hiding. And he even manages to abandon the three left alive by blocking a door and not letting them into the relatively safe room. What a dork. But also very predictable.
This movie drags on like this - with little bursts of activity in between long periods of hiding, bickering, dying. The only amusing part was that little stinking yappy dog - they find some BIG fireworks rockets, tape it to that little creep and send it out in the hallway with the big Predator-like thing. It can only stand there looking at it, still creeped out by it until the rockets shoot that stupid thing straight into the creature and all the fireworks explode. Somehow this disables the creature enough for the last two survivors to get out - the original boy and girl who had just broken up. Now they're all they have left. She offers him a ride home which he accepts until a huge shadow passes over him. He looks up in horror.
We then get a view over the roof of the building - London is a goner. A whole fleet of alien ships is busy blowing the hell out of everything, presumably with lots of those critters in each one. And that's where it ends.Not near as good as Alien or original like Predator. Not near as irritating as Cloverfield. Overall a meh creature movie with duh people. They should have had more creature and less soap opera.
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