https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yOYnV92dMDKtyp6gms3pCdtMWuhTOUItvd4FuKFGaxI/edit?usp=sharing – Full transcription
Welcome to REEL Film Reviewed. The show that delivers short, spoiler free reviews of films, TV shows and limited series followed by a deep dive discussion. I’m Kris Chaney and this is REEL Film Reviewed.
0:00:22.9
Welcome back to REEL Film Reviewed. Tonight I’m officially kicking off horror review season with Netflix’s new horror: No One Gets Out Alive.
I won’t only be reviewing horror films this month, I thought about it but I don’t want to leave out the great ones that are coming out simply because they are not horror but, I will promise at least one horror review each week this month.
0:00:43.7
Let’s get into the spoiler free review; An immigrant woman travels to the US after her mother dies to pursue a new life and while waiting for a job interview she is forced to take a room at a nightmarish boarding house. Once there she realizes she may never get out.
So I only recognized and knew Marc Menchaca who played one of the Langmores in Ozark the television series on Netflix. Most of the main cast was relatively unknown in the US.
This was another semi-foreign independent film so much of the cast is most likely known in the UK. The filming locations were in Cleveland, Ohio and Bucharest, Romania so there were some clear references to the locations in the film that are relevant to the story.
This film was definitely interesting, while the plot sounds basic the action in it certainly was not. It is primarily set in a house that looks condemned with two male workers and all women guests.
This struck me as odd, typically with women only places men are not allowed in at night.
Only during the day for things like repairs and delivery and things like that but they actually lived in this house too.
I would not call this film scary while there were some chilling moments and a couple of popup scares. Overall it wasn’t very scary. It wasn’t really a jumpy horror movie either. I would say it was more a gross horror movie and not the gory kind either. It’s interesting I won’t reveal too much about what made the film horror and what in fact is the reason No One Gets Out Alive. That was a reference to the title of the film, not a spoiler.
Bringing this to my REEL Review; 3 stars.
As stated earlier this was a fairly basic horror plot line: no twists, haunted house. It was pretty short so there was not a whole lot of time for backstory or character development. If you are looking for a short horror flick that’s decent to watch this is a decent mini dose of horror.
0:02:32.9
No One Gets Out Alive was released in 2021 and was directed by Santiago Menghini. It was based on a novel written by Adam Nevill and it stars Cristina Rodlo, Victoria Alcock, Marc Menchaca and David Figlioli it is rated R and has a runtime of 1 hour and 25 minutes. It can be viewed on the one and only Netflix.
0:02:52.7 Alright here is the spoiler alert warning. Those new to REEL Film Reviewed, after this point I will discuss this review further potentially and likely revealing spoilers. Thank you for listening to the spoiler free review. I’ll be back after a word about my sponsors.
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Welcome back everyone, so now we’re going to dive into this film a little bit deeper as I mentioned it was pretty short. I didn’t mean to dump on it in the short review. I did like it. It was just a really basic concept and then it kinda gets crazy right at the end and then all of a sudden you realize it’s over and it’s kinda weird.
Kinda getting into it there’s not really much of a backstory like I mentioned all we really know about Ambar is that her mom dies and then she leaves her mom in I believe it came.it was mexico that she came from but I’m not 100 percent certain, I believe it was referenced once at the beginning. She comes to Ohio and she’s working at some little sewing factory which is kinda interesting because it looks like she’s in a foreign country in a sweatshop but she’s actually in some place in Ohio. She’s working there while she gets this little connect with her uncle or cousin because her mom was his cousin and she calls him her uncle but I guess he’s really her cousin.
So yeah, anyways… He’s supposedly only going to help her because she was born in the United States. He said if she’s an illegal immigrant he can’t do anything to help her but because she’s like “Oh no I was born here.” She said that she was born in Texas so that’s kind of the first thing.
She’s adamant about getting a Texas ID and Texas information but the ID and stuff that her friend is trying to give her is an Ohio ID and she’s like; “No it has to be Texas.”I’m like ok I can understand if your birth certificate needed to be Texas but I didn’t really understand what the significance of the ID needed to be Texas over Ohio. She could have been born in Texas and moved back. That was a little bit that was unclear to me and to clarify what I’m talking about her uncle/cousin specifically says; make sure you bring your ID they’re big on that.
So we know that they are asking for an ID. I really just didn’t understand that part and he’s not even going to see it; it was going to be somebody that she was interviewing with. There were a couple little things like that jumped out at me, stuff like that kinda annoys me in movies. (Laughs) I Just have a particular thing for those types of random pieces that are added to movies that are supposed to make it more realistic but it just sounds stupid. It wasn’t that bad, it was a small thing.
Her friend appears to be nice but other than working at this factory we don’t really know her relationship with her friend; I think her name was Kinsi and she works with her in this little sewing factory but outside of that they have some drinks, we don’t really know how close she is. We do know that she knows that she’s an illegal immigrant but we don’t necessarily really know the extent of their relationship before they work together in this little factory. So they go out and have drinks, Kinsi talks to her about papers that she can get. Long story short, Kinsi says that she’ll loan her the rest of the money and that she says when you have the chance just give me the money you have and so Ambar gives her the money on the spot and we never see Kinsi again after that.
So at this point of the film that’s when Ambar kind of starts panicking and this forces her back to the house. She leaves the house because she gets freaked out and then like we saw she goes in the shower and she hears this woman screaming. She hears panting at first and I was kinda; That was creepy I will say that. Before she leaves the house and she takes the shower you can hear the panting from underneath the drain. I was just like; Oh my goodness I don’t even know what I would… (laughs) think about that if I was in the shower.
I didn’t understand why she was still in the shower after hearing all this panting. I’m like oh yeah, no i’d be super out and I would have left at the same exact time she did. But that was one thing that I noticed was that she got out of the house, she didn’t have a reason to go back to the house, so I’m trying to figure out why she was going back if she was so terrified of it.
But Kinsi takes her money and the guy tells her that he’s going to give her her little deposit back from the boarding house. So then she goes back and gets the money and I didn’t understand what was the relevance of like; I wouldn’t have even gone back in the house, your money is in your room like. No, that sounds like a trap.
So It was a little bit you know like well why would you got back into the house, well why wouldn’t he just go and bring it like well why would it be on your bed. You know it was just random, clearly she had moved out she had taken her stuff and she was out so it was just the stuff that they put together didn’t necessarily make sense.
It wasn’t too awful you know it wasn’t, It didn’t throw you off or throw you out of the story too much. It was just kind of like; Ok that wasn’t really necessary or was there a different way that this could have gone.
But anyways the brother’s, this movie is kind of like a house of wax type thing so the the two men that live in the house with the brothers and all we really know about one of the brothers, Becker is that he is sick in some way and I guess what we are supposed to learn at the end of this movie is that he’s not sick he’s actually possessed.
I didn’t understand why or how there’s no description you know. You know how in some movies there is some historian or some religious figure, somebody that they can reach out to that will explain a little bit about what’s going on.
Provide some kind of a backstory or something like that.
But there was nobody to provide any help in this situation, we are left to a lot of assumptions about this mysterious box that’s in this house and that’s really all that we see it’s just this box that opens up. It’s described in some descriptions that you can see of the film as Pandora’s box but that’s not referenced at any point in the film. For me I was just kinda like ok what’s in the box so that was kinda my thinking of it you know?
I’m like all right are we going to learn about what this box is, where it came from you know? We see a small little snippet in the beginning and that’s really, that’s really it. Finally, she gets back into the house. She gets Kidnapped right away, there’s no back and forth. It’s immediately into the danger.
He takes her downstairs and he covers her in like this. I guess it’s not dust it’s like particle board dust you know like when buildings come down it’s like that kind of stuff and he covers her in it.
That part I didn’t get either that’s not explained really in the film either I know that there’s a lot of like butterflies and moths and stuff like that but i’m not really understanding what the relevance is to the, It might of be ash also that’s kind of what it looks like but it could just be what it ‘s supposed to resemble. It’s not really what it looks like on her skin, it is grey but i’m just like what’s the significance of that? Becker comes back upstairs and then he puts his hands on her and he takes her downstairs. So what the hell, at this point.
We see this hand moth insect thing? But it’s like a mummy? So I have no idea what this thing is. It’s got two big arms that are like human arms and then it’s got this centerpiece that’s like a bug it has like a body of like a bee or like a roach kind of body and then it’s got a mummified corpse on top of it and then the center in between the two arm pieces, there’s not really a head. It’s this opening I guess I’ll say and then these hands come out of the opening and it rips heads off.
Totally random who thinks of that? I’m going to go ahead and say it, the way that it looks when the head comes off and the hands come down is just really odd. It looks like somebody is hovering a toilet seat and it’s just… I don’t really understand what the description is supposed to… What is the image? What are we supposed to be seeing and feeling?
At the end of this film we know that Red, who is the other brother that rented out the room to Ambar in the beginning is crippled on the floor because she comes out wailing and attacking because she ends up getting free from whatever reason. She overcomes her little nightmare that she’s having. Supposedly that’s caused by whatever entity this is. Again a lot of things are left to assumptions so when he opens up the box she immediately goes into a dream state and it’s just really odd. Her mother’s in the hospital and she has to say no to her mother and she suffocates her and she ends up breaking free. The monster goes back in.
So I am assuming those that are able to break free in the visions that it’s giving them are the ones that it lets live and those are the ones that end up bringing more bodies to it. Again assuming that’s what happened to Becker. So after she breaks free she attacks both Red and Becker and she beats Becker to death. Red ends up getting injured in this and at the end she drags him to this thing. Puts him on the table and this thing bites his head off and then she kind of just watches for a second, walks back up to the front of the house and her ankle was broken from all of this going on and she straightens it. I’m like ok, so is she the thing? I don’t understand what’s going on right now. Is she one of the ghosts? That’s the other thing we see these random ghosts in the house and one of them is called Mary and one of them we actually don’t know the name of but she’s like a younger girl. I don’t understand what that was either, are these the souls of the people that this thing was waiting this whole time in this house? You know I just, there was a whole lot of confusion. We were kind of just along for the ride so it’s a nice little ride if you don’t really want to know anything about it.
It was just kind of different and that thing at the end was just kind of different and there, again there’s no other explanation of it. It just goes back into the box and she goes up the stairs and looks out and it ends. I was kind of like oh ok, (laughs) that’s interesting. That will be a short review for me so cool, make my job easy! I did enjoy it, it was different and it appeared to be. before it ended.
It was kind of like the first time I saw IT, the movie was really really good and then when you get to the end you see it was just a giant spider and you are like; ohh ok (laughs) awesome!
Yeah, this one wasn’t necessarily super good all the way through. It was fairly decent so three stars
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(Episode transcribed by: http://www.podcastingnetwork.net)
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