Good afternoon, House of Madness hostages:
When you go to the grocery store, do you make a list? Eggs, check. Milk, check. Bread, check. Secret cookies nobody will know about, check. What about fantasy football; do you go in blind, or is your list so detailed, that you have CFL QB's on your radar 'just in case'? It's always good to have a list when being dragged to Ikea by your significant other, as 654 husbands and boyfriends die in Ikea accidents every year, and all could have been prevented with simple planning and scheduled water breaks. When it comes to lists, "No Exit" definitely has all the bases covered, and went to excruciating lengths to ensure they left nothing to chance. Protagonist with a troubled past, check. Ability to escape incarceration and steal a car with a screwdriver and hammer, check. Arriving at a secluded building with a former Marine on the side of the good guys, while bumbling idiot antagonists run around behaving like Abbott and Costello persuing a mummy with a treasure chest, check. Yep, lists are important, and I made sure to bring my list of horror cliches just so I could immerse myself in the movie, and feel like I was part of the action. I should have brought more pens.
Darby (Havana Rose Liu) is in rehab, and has burned every bridge while betraying everyone's trust, especially those in her immediate family. This is made clear as she receives a phone call informing her that her mother has had a brain aneurysm, but when she calls her sister for more details, she's met with hostility and pleas of staying as far away as possible, as everyone is tired of her bullshit. Things have actually been going well this time, and her last relapse was the final relapse. Probably. Maybe. Well, we think so. Time to bust outta this crazy castle, steal some wheels, and head to Salt Lake City before mom has a chance to have another aneurysm after seeing Darby again. Darby springs her plan into action, and before we can say "Where are the security guards?", she's already broken into a closet, grabbed a screwdriver and hammer, and is through the unlocked doors into the outside world, ready to play Grand Theft Auto without all the loading screens. She finds one of the orderly's cars, works her magic (after finding some magic dust under the visor too) and is on her way to SLC with only snow and asphalt in her rearview mirror.
As Darby makes her way up the mountain, she is stopped by a state trooper who explains she either needs to turn back, or chill at the visitor's center up the road until the storm passes. She of course chooses the visitor's center, and walks in to be greeted by Ed (Dennis Haysbert), an ex-marine and his wife Sandi (Dale Dickey). There is also a sketchy looking freak named Lars (David Rysdahl) and someone sleeping on a bench named Ash (Danny Ramirez). As everyone gets more accustomed with one another over a game of cards, Darby heads outside to see if she can get a phone signal in order to try and reason with her sister. As Darby is walking through the parking lot, she hears what sounds like muffled screams coming from the back of a van. She investigates and sure enough, there's a little girl restrained in the back clearly in distress. It's too risky to try and free her now, so Darby heads back inside to try and narrow down who the culprit is. To nobody's surprise, all signs point to the weirdo that hates losing at cards, so now it's just a matter of sharing the information with someone she can trust. Personally, I would have chosen the Marine, but Darby decides to go with Ash instead, because he's kinda cute, and she likes his designer jeans. Unluckily for Darby, Lunatic Lars has a partner, and he's not a Marine. Well, shit.
The jig is up, and now things are getting complicated. The little girl in the back of the van is Jay (Mila Harris), a kidnapping victim in a human trafficking ring organized (using this very loosely) by Ash and Lars's uncle. Jay escapes, Darby chases, Ash and Lars chase, Jay gets found outside by Ed, and the disorganized chaos continues. There's only so many times I can hear "They're going to kill us" before I start calling their bluff, and my interest in whether anyone lives or dies fades into feelings of monotonous boredom. In an effort to ramp up the tension from a 1.3 to a 1.7/10, we find out that Sandi is Jay's housekeeper, and is the one responsible for letting Jay's abductors enter the home, in an effort to pay off Ed's gambling debts he's accrued over the years. Not to worry, Darby has that magic dust she found while stealing the car, and not even Popeye's spinach could turn the tides faster in someone's favour. The ending plays out in a trope of ridiculous cliches that you could see through a straw from 1000 miles away, and the paint-by-numbers mystery is solved. All "No Exit" was missing was a dog named Scooby-Doo and his gang of super sleuths, it's just too bad the Mystery Machine doesn't have snow tires.
Madness Meter: 3.9/10
NB
