PlatinumRead Just so...so bad

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

proxyisalive Where do I even start? The story begins with a group of friends, some good acting,but multiple confusing flashbacks, typical dialog, and a tangled mess of motives,ideas and effects. I don't watch horror often and am reasonablysusceptible to scares and atmosphere when done well. The main hangup is that this entire story makes NO SENSE! Apparently, a group of kids leave their parents while at an amusement park to go to a haunted house under construction. Later on in the story though, when the characters need to find a hospital, they drive there instead. Lo and behold, it actually is a hospital now! Well, at least some parts of it. These people somehow forgot that this haunted house/hospital was the scene of the deadly accident that has plagued them for so many years. One credit I will give this movie is that it has some cool moments. However, they are all in the trailer. Literally, I wish I had just seen the trailer. There is one special gem of utter stupidity that makes this movie stand out in my mind though as a rare kind of bad: The "Grudge"-esque girl died from falling from a spiral staircase in the haunted house, so, naturally, one of her methods of offing her friends is to repeatedly throw herself off the stairs, bludgeoning him to death with her own body, climbing up the stairs after each successful dive. If this doesn't tell you everything you ever needed to know about this film, I don't know what will.

adriangr "Shock Labyrinth" really only has it's boffo title and packaging going for it. Everything else about the movie fails to deliver.The plot...well, apparently a group of friends visit a spooky fairground attraction as children and there is some kind of accident in which one of the girls vanishes. Then, 10 or so years later the same friends find themselves tricked into going to an abandoned hospital, which then turns into the same funhouse from their past, and they re-live the frightening experience all over again, possibly as part of the twisted revenge of the missing/dead girl.That might have worked as a plot, in fact on paper it looks pretty good, but watching this movie is absolutely no fun at all. There is but a single key event in the movie, which is that somebody falls over the handrail and down the well of a spiral staircase. Believe it or not, the whole film is constructed to dwell on this one event in as many ways as it is possible. First we see the original accident, then we see it again from another view, then we see other characters go through the same event either as witnesses or as victims themselves, sometimes in their childhood and sometimes in their adult states. The film thinks it's clever in mixing the evens of the past with the present, but it doesn't hold any suspense whatsoever, it just looks like a bunch of kids running in circles and then a bunch of adults running in circles again. The so-called shocks of the labyrinth are provided by (wait for it) a white toy bunny and a yellow balloon with a smiling bumble bee on it. Shots of the bunny in particular are wheeled out interminably, not that a single shot of it provokes any feelings of fear whatsoever. At no point in the film does anything approaching scary happen. Not in one single minute of it, and therefore I count "Shock Labyrinth" as a total failure to entertain.By the way, you might pick up the DVD that comes with both 3D and 2D versions, but if you think the 3D will rescue it, think again. It's totally unwatchable, I only lasted about 1.5 minutes before yanking off the 3D specs and sticking the 2D version on.What a shame.

ersinkdotcom "Shock Labyrinth 3D" revolves around a group of childhood friends who share a tragic and dark secret. Their friend Yuki went missing 10 years earlier in a haunted house attraction they snuck into. One night, the lost child shows up as an adult at her friends' front door, frightened and still dressed the same way she was when she disappeared. The group decide to take her to the hospital and upon arriving discover they are locked in the abandoned building with something or someone sinister playing with their minds. Shimizu has a way with pulling you into his films and getting you emotionally involved. He takes you through all sorts of different emotions, from fear to sadness to empathy all in a 90 minute time period. His work goes so much deeper than what American viewers have seen with his "The Grudge" movies. Fans of intelligent horror films will love the "Shock Labyrinth 3D." The movie is an atmospheric and claustrophobic journey through the darkest parts of a person's mind. The fact that it was shot in the actual "Shock Labyrinth" haunted house attraction in Japan helps with the distinctive character of the film.

gothic_a666 There are many things amiss in 'Shock Labyrinth'. It is a supernatural revenge story with a time travel paradox twist but it collapses inwardly on its convoluted execution until any sense of mood is completely destroyed. Plot-wise it has potential: something dreadful happens to a group of children when they enter a haunted house attraction after closing hours. Ten years later the girl who went missing returns, causing them all to face the past.An interesting premise only makes it more painful when the movie does not live up to it. Extremely redundant repetitions make 'Shock Labyrinth' extremely predictable yet at the same time rather random. Images that are supposed to be disturbing are overused to the point of becoming silly, such as the floating bunny plush toy. Dummies staggering about add insult to injury since they do not even fit into the narrative and only seem to be there for the sake of filling movie time.As far as acting goes, the child actors go very well and capture how a combination few childish mistakes can end in tragedy but the adult cast is for the most part hopeless. The one who does hold her water just so happens to disappear from the screen all too soon. There is much walking about in ill lit corridors and even if the deliberately cheesy set is unsettling at first it becomes tiresome all too soon. Good horror manages to increase the tension with each repetition but bad horror cannot help but flounder when employing such a tactic.And 'Shock Labyrinth' is a bad horror movie. After skipping about madly as if in search of closure the plot settles for the never missing twist. It is disappointing that a director that has already shown how he can inject innovation into J-horror should produce such a dispirited movie.