10 Cloverfield Lane
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Year Released: 2016
Rating: 2.0
Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) flees her fiancé's place and gets into a bad car accident - when she wakes up, she's chained up in a basement by a man named Howard (John Goodman) who tells her the world is under attack and he's keeping her imprisoned for her own good (she's skeptical, of course, and tries to escape). This owes a major amount of debt to Goodman for giving the tired B-horror setup (woman in chains!) some much-needed tension - the first two acts are intended to make the audience question whether he's nuts or telling the truth (or somewhere in-between) - before turning into another kind of genre (alien invasion!) for the lackluster conclusion, where Winstead is able to blow up a gassy spaceship with a flaming bottle of Scotch. A shower curtain and plastic water bottles can be used for protection in case of a chemical/biological attack? The more you know....
