Writer: Tomm Cocker, David Elliot
Director: Tomm Cocker, David Elliot
Catacombs is set in the (real life) burial tunnels under Paris, a wonderfully evocative location. Unfortunately the movie fails to capture any of the atmosphere you’d expect.
The story revolves around two very different sisters: tight-laced Victoria (Shannyn Sossamon) and fun-loving Carolyn (Pink aka Alecia Moore). Carolyn invites Carolyn to Paris and, in an effort to get her to lighten up, takes her to an illegal underground rave – literally underground, in the skull filled Catacombs.
Once there she gets invited to the private room with the party’s organisers where she hears stories of a Satanic cult and the minotaur-like bull masked savage who reputedly haunts the place. Later on, when the others are skinny dipping, she wanders off alone… at which point things start to get bad. Suffice to say there’s lot of running and screaming.
Actually, that’s about all there is. The beginning of the film makes it clear that Victoria is taking medication for an anxiety disorder and also has an over-active imagination. So I was expecting a dream/nightmare like atmosphere where we weren’t sure how much was real. Whilst we get some duality, we don’t get the atmosphere.
How can you make a film based in the Catacombs and fail to get any atmosphere? One way is an excess of running and screaming at the expense of story or subtlety. To make it worse the directors seem to find it difficult to hold any shot longer than ten seconds before cutting; this might work for a music video or an adrenaline filled action thriller but is inappropriate here. It also makes the film tiring to watch.
Acting is decent enough, both Sossamon and Pink do a good job – when they’re allowed to do so by the dull and repetitive script.
Eventually we get an ending which is not overly surprising but at least dramatically fulfilling.
If you strip out 20 minutes of the Paris sightseeing at the beginning and half an hour or so of running and screaming then you’d probably be left with decent episode of a sting-in-the-tail TV show. But as it stands I wouldn’t recommend sitting through Catacombs in its entirety.