CUBE (1997)
Section of the cinematic cemetery: Sci-fi psycho-drama, Saw-style, but pre-Saw
Cause of (premature) death: It’s a low-budget Canadian sci-fi film. How low budget? $365,000. And it grossed only a fraction of that opening weekend in the States.
What its tombstone would read: Seven strangers awoke to find themselves in a larger-than-life-size fatally booby-trapped Rubik’s Cube of sort.
Why it should be revived: Like I said, it’s Saw, pre-Saw. But what really makes this film so great aren’t just the deadly traps of acid-sprays and falling graters, but also the intellectualness of it all. The strangers wake up in a small square room. Each wall of the room has a door that leads to another square room, each marked by a several-digit number. What that number tells them is whether that room is safe or rigged with a trap. The rooms are also shifting every few seconds. And the number reveals that too. It’s all about decoding the number and figuring out which cube will lead them out, all in the midst of outbursts of human drama, paranoia and mass confusion. It’s a tense, clever, gross-out film that accumulates in the greatest upheaval of all.
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