Thursday, September 01, 2016

Bringing Along A Canary Wouldn't Have Helped

I came across this movie Mine Games last week. Bunch of 20-somethings going to enjoy some vacation at a cabin in the woods. They find an old mine with "Break the Cycle" scrawled outside it. I'm guessing they assumed someone was a big fan of Staind and went in, and one of them got scratched on the ankle and begins making strange, feverish statements. Two of them get drunk and go back in, and find their own corpses. Then they find one of the girls locked inside a room in there, even though she's also back in the cabin. And shit pretty much went downhill from there.

I missed the beginning of the film, so I'm not sure whether they succeeded in breaking the cycle. Two of them attempted to flee by running back down the road, only for one of them to get hit by their van as their group was driving to the cabin (which is why the van was busted and they were running rather than driving). But she'd survived and dragged herself up and went on down the road, and reached the gas station the group had stopped at and ran right up to the van, with her earlier self sitting in it and they saw her. Which I would expect would solve the problem. Hey, we found a badly injured you coming from our destination, let's cancel our party weekend and go home. Cycle broken. But maybe that had already happened and they dismissed it for some reason. "Wow, that was traumatic. Let's go to the cabin and drink beers to unwind and process this strange event!"

The feverish girl is apparently seeing what they've already lived through, but is unfortunately only able to offer just enough hints to make them do the stupidest possible things. They get scared of the member of the group she warns them about, so they try locking him in the mine. Which is what prompted his will to survive to someone manifest as kickstart this whole mess. If you think there's weird shit going on in the mine, why would you lock anyone in there?

It feels a bit like that line about how people in zombie movies always act like they live in a universe where zombie movies don't exist. You'd think they'd maybe take a more sensible approach, but no. Which doesn't account for it being real easy for me to Monday Morning Quarterback from here, compared to them actually experiencing everything in-story. Which is what can possibly excuse it. They're scared, they're drunk, they probably aren't very bright normally, they make poor decisions that seem good at the time.

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