My part time management night job requires me to do a lot of things that deal with loss prevention, money and the security of the store(s) that I work in. When I count the money at the end of the night, there are three doors locked behind me when I do a drop. There are rules that I follow for the safety of not only the store but of the people I work with. There is no hanging out at the end of the night in the store and no one is ever left alone when leaving. When we close, the whole store is locked up like Fort Knox before we venture home.
Unfortunately, most places don’t use such tactics to prevent bad things from happening. Such is the case with Cornered, which exploits all the bad things that can happen when a business closes for the night and the employees don’t go home.
A serial killer hunting down employees in retail and convenience stores is hunting victims in Los Angeles. He is in a store with closed circuit televisions as he likes to make sure every murder he commits is caught on tape. Once he is done murdering them all, he takes the tapes as souvenirs. A bunch of convenience store employees after work are hanging out in an apartment above the store playing cards when they find themselves locked in. The killer is there with them and begins to kill anyone he finds that strays from the group. The unique and artistic ways he murders his victims becomes his own personal artwork. The rest of the employees who have avoided his grasp by locking themselves up in the surveillance room must find a way to survive the night before the killer figures out a way to make them his next victims.
The film starts out very slowly with a lot of redundant character development that I found to be completely unnecessary. Usually, overdeveloping characters in a film is not a bad thing. However, I just don’t want to know more than I need to know about characters who are going to be killed off before the film really starts to get its footing. In this case, it really is not until the third act. Until then, the film just bored me. The last half hour of the film is decent, but it takes a long time for it to get there.
Cornered has some name actors in it, including James Duval from Donnie Darko and an actor who I honestly thought had retired, Steve Guttenberg of Three Men and a Baby, and Police Academy fame. The film has some great acting, and seeing Guttenberg in a role that is very different from the characters he usually plays makes the film better. Unfortunately for this film, he does not really show up until that last half hour because his appearance makes the film slightly better. Guttenberg surprised me in the role as the slow and timid Morty. It is a role in which I never would have expected to see him, and his performance is great.
The DVD will hit the streets on June 1st, and although I do not really agree with one of my colleagues here on the site who covered the film for the New York Horror Film Festival, it is a film that I believe some may like all the way through. It is essentially just another one of those torture flicks, but it does have some kick when the action gets going.
– Horror Bob
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
