Walled In 牆裡有鬼

Mischa Barton plays the lead role as Sam Walczak, a young woman who has just graduated from engineering school. She is put in charge of the preparations to the demolish the aforementioned building for her father's demolition company.

When Sam arrives, she finds out that some people are still living in the premises. They let her stay in the building, but set strange rules. One of them is that she can't go to the eighth floor, because the architect lives there, though newspapers reported him dead years ago.

One of the residents, Jimmy (Cameron Bright), directly falls in love with Sam, who is already engaged. He creeps about night and day, stalking her and trying to get her attention in all kinds of ways.

Soon, Sam finds out that the blueprints and the reality of the building don't quite match. Instead of requesting the right blueprints, she instantly goes about searching for the answers to this riddle.

Yet she gets caught up in her search for answers, and goes all paranoid. There are a lot of stingers (sudden, loud sounds) to scare the audience, though nothing much has happened so far.

The movie, not the plot, takes a total U-turn when Sam's fiancé, Peter comes by to surprise her (of course with a loud stinger, boom! Oh it's just Peter). "If it looks like a goat, sounds like a goat, must be a... cow? Well, that is how I feel with movies like this: showing me all the signs of one genre, just to switch midway to something else," commented horror-movies.ca on the sudden change.

"An attractive film with a solid cast, "Walled In," however, further goes to waste on a convoluted plot that combines cliched elements from ghost stories, torture porn and backwoods horror," about.com's movie reviewer Mark H. Harris said regarding the vain attempts to copy the successful elements of other successful horror movies, such as "The Shining."

Most movie goers seem to agree that the movie had a lot of potential, but was poorly executed. They mentioned the failed acting performances and the muddled plot.

Indeed, the acting is likewise lacking, despite the promising cast. "Maybe French director Gilles Paquet-Brenner's language barrier hindered the cast's performance, because Jimmy sounds like Napoleon Dynamite and Sam comes off as an OC star trying to sound like an adult," Harris added.

As usual, the fact that the movie was directly released on DVD in the United States is not a good sign for local audiences, and to launch it into Taiwan's cinemas is surely a questionable decision.

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