Whatever the hottest trend in horror is at any given time, expect to see a dozen DVD covers trying to assert that their contents are pretty much that movie, only different. For years after Freddy got big, you couldn't walk through a video store without seeing 50 gloop-faced latex faces competing for your wisecracking-maniac dollars. Now low-low-low budget horror movies mostly rip off Saw or Hostel. The Entrance opts for the former, but the problem for budget-minded filmmakers is that movies about people forced to play elaborate games for their life are going to cost more than, say, sticking a bunch of teenagers in the woods and having someone chase them around—unless you do it like The Entrance, namely keeping almost all the action offscreen and making the games musical chairs and cards. I'm not kidding. Onscreen, the characters do much more cost-effective things like talk, drive around and spend an ungodly amount of time creeping around what has got to be the least scary parking garage of all time. Speaking of ungodly, this parking garage is where evil lives, and while I hate opportunistic event-parking rates as much as the next guy, that's just hilarious. So is the supernatural "twist" on the Saw concept that has a demon orchestrating these games for ... some reason. An inexplicable "Inspired by True Events" device links the modern-day detective story to some legend about a 15th-century monk who claimed to have exorcised a nun. The monk spends the movie endlessly writing. The people behind this movie did not. Extras include a making-of doc.

Send a letter to the editor about this story.