7 BELOW (2012)

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Directed by Kevin Carraway
Written by Kevin Carraway, Lawrence Sara

Wow, just when you thought Val Kilmer couldn’t phone his roles in any further, he makes a film like this and his telephone bill just doubles.

7 BELOW is a muddled ghost story about a group of travelers who get into a car crash and end up having to spend the night in an old mansion in a forest. Before the wreck, we get a fifteen-minute intro to the characters, all of them flawed and somewhat unhappy with their existence. Wreck happens. Ving Rhames shows up to save the day, as Ving Rhames tends to do in these types of films. Soon, Ving and the survivors of the wreck find themselves in the middle of the worst storm in 100 years according to Ving and trapped in a cold, dark house.

Cell phones? Yeah, right. They don’t work in these types of films. No electricity or land lines either at this house. So all the survivors of the wreck can do is sit and wait out the storm. This being a ghost story, that wait is a little harder than they planned as folks start getting offed one by one.

Kevin Carraway does a decent job of making this film feel like a low budget version of THE WOMAN IN BLACK with creepy kids popping up here and there causing menace. Some of these ghosts are residual ghosts, reenacting past events of horror. Others are more violent and strike out at our guests. Carraway does his best in the cramped quarters and actually pulls off some decent shocks midway through this film. The film screeches to a complete halt, though, at the hour mark as Ving must explain to our final few survivors what is actually going on. By this time, the audience has figured things out, but just to make sure, Ving must reiterate the whole plot and dot all T’s and cross all I’s to be sure before the shockeroo ending that lacks in both shocker and oo.

Ving plays Ving as Ving always plays Ving, except the odd moment when he shrieks in a high voice at the survivors (a moment in the film which was truly and most likely unintentionally unsettling). He’s not bad. He’s just…Ving here. The other actors don’t really stand out other than Luke Goss (HELLBOY 2 and BLADE 2), who does a decent turn as a responsible older brother.

Oh yeah–I can’t forget Val Kilmer, who saunters though this film as if he’s still playing Jim Morrison 20 years and 100 pounds later. Sure, the film calls for Val to be drunk and somewhat dazed from the crash, though I’m not sure whether that was just the writer/director thinking quick and rewriting to match Kilmer’s condition while filming. It was kind of fascinating watching the man work as he clearly adopts the attitude of “No Fucks Given” with ease every second he’s on screen in this film.

Mild shocks permeate 7 BELOW, but the thing that will interest most are the odd performance by Ving and Kilmer’s sleepwalk through the narrative.