Horror Movie Review: The Tombs (2019)

The Tombs… it is a movie that exists and you can watch. That is about as much kindness that can be mustered for this snore-fest of a horror movie.

Directed by Dan Brownlie and written by Michael William Smith, The Tombs initially creates intrigue with its meta-angle. In this story, a slasher horror movie called The Tombs, set in the London Tombs scare attraction, was released and turned out to be a big hit. Now, its sequel time and to promote it, a group of b-list celebs and cast members, which includes Piper (Jessica Ann Brownlie) star of the first film, are spending the night at the attraction. All live-streamed for a horror hungry audience.

It’s all fun and games until someone bleeds on a specific skull within the attraction. A real skull that belongs to a necromancer who was buried in the plague pit discovered during renovations. Awakened, it possesses the body of one of the workers and sets about killing off the cast until it can find a new host.

Unoriginal but meta and a tad interesting. There’s a ton of different directions this movie could have gone in. Which makes the hum-drum direction it goes in, all the more painful to watch.

Now, if you don’t know, The London Tombs is a real-life location in London, UK and this film serves as one big advertisement for the scare-attraction. Yet, other then showing us room after room of horror-themed imagery, the location really doesn’t matter. It’s not worked into the story, aside from the reason the cast are there, and could have easily been substituted for a local funfair scare attraction.

Putting it bluntly, this film makes The London Tombs seem like a pretty bland and boring place to visit.

Talking of bland and boring though. The cast and killer are just as bad. Here we have a group of blank and unlikable slates defined by what made them famous. There’s nothing to define them, nothing to connect too and nothing to like about them. That some of the performances are as wooden as the props in the attraction certainly doesn’t help.

As for the villain? Even more disappointing. A super-natural entity that moves slowly, wears a sack over its head and attacks like any human killer ever.

The movie doesn’t even have much in the way of blood and guts, delivering plenty of kills off-screen and only showing the aftermath. The few kills that we do see are as unimaginative as can be. A neck snap here or an axe to the stomach. Yawn.

At around 80 minutes long, The Tombs feels 40 minutes too long. The lack of imagination, the snore-inducing story and pacing, the rubbish characters and forgettable villain makes this one to avoid.