I am no fan of “found-footage” movies (The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity; that kind of thing), but I agreed to review The Tunnel just to try something different and see if it might be some kind of hidden gem. It was a mistake. I know some horror fans will enjoy this movie, but sadly I am not one of them.
The Tunnel is an Australian movie about mysterious underground installations underneath Sydney. It is presented as a documentary, interspersed with footage filmed by a journalist and her camera crew in the sewers and tunnels beneath the city. The journalist somehow finds out that something strange is going on in these tunnels, where homeless people are living. So she takes a camera crew down there to see what the story is.
Almost nothing happens in the movie. We just see the crew going through endless tunnels, shooting terrible footage of walls and dirt. Apparently this sort of thing is considered scary and exciting by some audiences. To me it was only a waste of time. About halfway into the movie (45 minutes!) something happens to one of the crew, and towards the end something else happens to another. They also appear to encounter some strange and scary sewer people, but nothing at all is ever actually explained, nor shown clearly, except for the crew inferring that it’s probably all to do with some government cover-up. To this reviewer, the movie is a dire borefest that offers absolutely nothing new or fresh, even within the confines of its own subgenre.
Fans of the movie have singled out the audio experience, calling it effectively scary, and I suppose that’s a fair point. Unfortunately, that kind of thing has very little meaning for me without a good visual or narrative dimension to go with it.
The DVD is a nice package, though, with several extra features, including production diaries. The main Behind the Scenes feature is a surprisingly 73 minutes long, and far more watchable than the movie itself, recounting how the project evolved from a 45 second teaser to a fan-funded movie where money was raised by selling off each individual frame of the movie for a dollar each, which for 90 minutes came to 135,000 dollars.
The Tunnel was released to UK DVD on August 6.
Director: Carlo Ledesma
Cast: Bel Deliá, Andy Rodoreda, Steve Davis, Luke Arnold and others.
Runtime: 90 min.
Country: Australia
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