Catacombs

In the grand tradition of other shot-in-the-dark movies like Unearthed and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, comes 2007’s Catacombs. Unlike the other two, where you felt as if there might be an interesting movie going on if you could just see what was happening, that thought will never cross your mind while watching this.

Shannyn Sossamon (A Knight’s Tale) plays a meek American girl, scared of her own shadow. She is invited to Paris to spend time with her grad student sister (Alecia Moore, who is apparently a pop singer under the name Pink). The sisters are complete opposites in personality and seem to deeply hate each other, which is the first big mystery, mainly why the hell do they want to hang out together. Shannyn meets her sister’s friends, who make a hobby out of scaring people (Plot point!). All the French people are played by Romanians, by the way. I guess all Europeans look the same.

Sis takes Shannyn to a rave in the Catacombs, the great underground burial grounds of Paris. There they listen to awful techno-pop, and meet more of sis’s friends who are apparently obsessed with death. They tell her of a story of a man-like beast in a ram’s mask that kills people in a ram’s mask (we’ve already seen a victim of this in the pre-credits). After the police raid the party, poor Shannyn is cut off from the group, and is apparently chased by the underground creature. What we actually get is an hour of the actress running through the dark, occasionally coming to a dead end (she always screams “No!” at this point) and incessantly talking to herself. The girl will not shut up, and I was definitely wanting to kill her myself.

The movie ends with a lame twist that contradicts the aforementioned pre-credits sequence. Avoid this one.