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The Tomb: Devil's Revenge
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| Year: |
2019
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Director: |
Jared Cohn
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| Stars: |
William Shatner, Jeri Ryan, Jason Brooks, Robert Scott Wilson, Ciara Hanna, Phillip Andre Botello, Brendan Wayne, Sewell Whitney, Jackie Dallas, AnnMarie GiaQuinto, John Patrick O'Brien, C. Hamilton Graziano
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| Genre: |
Horror, Action, Trash |
| Rating: |
  3 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Sergio (Jason Brooks) has undertaken a spelunking expedition to investigate the cave that has so much significance for his family, for it is within its stone walls that a relic can be found, a relic that has cursed them all. If he manages to find this object, he can destroy it, and lift the curse, but this proves to be easier said than done when one of the two friends he is with gets down on the ground, rolls a little down a slight incline and breaks his ankle in the process. Sergio goes to help but catches sight of something in the darkness ahead and after reassuring his injured mate, heads off to find out more. It is here he actually discovers the relic, but loses it again, so when he returns he sees the curse has happened again and his friend is bloody and dying...
Known simply as Devil's Revenge in some territories, which makes a shade more sense as there is no tomb in this, this was a low budgeter that attracted some interest for its casting of two Star Trek stars in lead roles, William Shatner, Captain James T. Kirk himself, and Jeri Ryan, who played catsuited Borg refugee Seven of Nine. Although if you were looking forward to seeing them square up against each other, or even share a meta joke or two, you would be disappointed as they did not appear in any scenes together, because obviously that might be something audiences would want to see in a movie, and that wasn't the way director Jared Cohn and writer Maurice Hurley were going to play this. And anyway, Hurley, a Star Trek TNG producer, had been dead four years by the time of release.
Shatner, bless him, was not about to let his advancing years hold him back, so threw himself into his role of Sergio's dad Hayes with great gusto in typically Shatnerian style, the main problem with that being he wasn't in the end result very much. Indeed, it took a good half hour for him to appear at all, whereupon after ten minutes of his inimitable emoting he vanished from the movie, returning for the finale where he drives up in a gold cart, armed to the teeth, to see it that his son won't be taken by the demons and that his portly stunt double, who has notably darker hair than Shatner does, can earn a wage packet carrying out any tricky shots like walking through the forest at a distance. There was more walking here than there was in the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy, or so it seemed, as Sergio corralled his whole family (he's married to Ryan and they have two grown kids) to fight the good fight.
Before that it was established Sergio (Sergio?!) is prone to hallucinating the demons, so when he has a seizure and is rushed to hospital, it looks like the suspiciously empty establishment has hired heavy metal Eurovision winners Lordi among its staff - things are tough in the health industry right now, one supposes. Anyway, this also has our permanently confused hero seeing antagonists who aren't there, so on visiting university to meet his daughter (Ciara Hanna) he sees her snogging her boyfriend in the library and slams the guy up against the shelves, only to realise he wasn't disrespectin' him at all. For some reason, the boyfriend is then disembowelled by the demons later on and is never referred to again. Not to worry, the Sergio brood have their trip to go on, which they undertake in a weatherbeaten Winnebago and a handy dinghy until what seems like a few hours of screen time later they get to confront Skeletor and his pals. Incoherent, cheap (how many times did they use that explosion effect?), but at various points absolutely hilarious, this was a must for bad movie buffs. Everyone else? Weigh your options. Music by Jurgen Engler.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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