7 Below (2012) poster

7 Below (2012)

Rating:


USA. 2012.

Crew

Director – Kevin Carraway, Screenplay – Kevin Carraway & Lawrence Sara, Producers – Eric Mark Fischer, Brianna Lee Johnson, Aymie Majerski, Warren Ostergard & Terry Rindal, Photography – Harris Charalambous, Music – Jake Staley, Visual Effects – Barking Fish Entertainment (Supervisor – Joe Busam), Special Effects Supervisor – Timothy Gray, Production Design – Timmy Carlin & Nora Martini. Production Company – EFish Entertainment/Barking Fish Entertainent/Vitamin A Films/Palmstar Media Capital/Silver Moonlight Productions.

Cast

Ving Rhames (Jack), Matt Barr (Adam), Rebecca Da Costa (Courtney), Luke Goss (Isaac), Val Kilmer (Bill McCormick), Bonnie Somerville (Brooklyn), Christian Baha (Dr Lipski), Silvio Wolf Busch (William McKnight), Brianna Lee Johnson (Elizabeth McKnight), Jennifer Trier (Aunt May), Corey Riley (Sean McKnight)


Plot

Five people – brothers Isaac and Adam, embittered husband and wife Bill and Brooklyn McClintock, and the doctor Lipski – are strangers come together on a weekend getaway. The driver of the bus swerves to avoid a girl on the road and they crash during which the driver is killed. The group accept a ride from the mysterious Jack who urges them to get out of the approaching storm. They settle in back at his house but mysterious things begin happening as members of the group are killed and it appears the place is haunted by a series of murders that occurred a hundred years earlier.


This was the second film from director Kevin Carraway. Carraway had previously made The Fear Chamber (2009) and subsequently went on to Way of the Wicked (2014) and the action film Echo Effect (2015). Carraway has also produced a number of other films including Way of the Vampire (2005), Marked (2007) and Passed the Door of Darkness (2008), plus several action films.

7 Below has a feel that it should be a decent little film. It brings in some solid names in its cast – Ving Rhames, Luke Goss and Val Kilmer. Kilmer has the most entertaining role in the film – that of a husband who spends all the time bickering with wife Bonnie Somerville about the shortcomings of their marriage before the bus stops at a convenience store and he immediately steps off and tries to chat up store clerk Rebecca Da Costa. Much to the film’s loss, he gets to be one of the first characters to be killed off.

Ving Rhames as Jack in 7 Below (2012)
Ving Rhames as the mysterious Jack

The rest of 7 Below plays out like a ghost story that hasn’t really figured out what it wants to do. The plot meanders around the various characters and their interactions. People are occasionally killed. The film seems awfully vague about the agency behind everything, never really coming out to clearly put a finger on what is going on. It does at least does bring things together to wind in the prologue for a passable twist ending.

One of the biggest killers of the film – at least in the dvd version I watched – is the sound editing. Here the score is allowed to play over everything to the extent it frequently drowns out dialogue and makes it difficult to hear what is being said by the characters during crucial exchanges. The score also seems made up of clichéd cues designed to hype atmosphere and happenings even when such does not seem to be occurring on screen.


Trailer here


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