A Waste of a Blank DVD: Steel Trap

by Andrew Jupin

My fellow film-savvy friends and I like to get together on Friday every now and again for an evening of what most people would consider to be a 'waste of time'. We purposely go out to the video store and flip through our own collections and try to find a candidate for what we have so lovingly come to call, "Shitty Movie Friday." However, the new release from Dimension Extreme is a movie so bad, so lazily hashed out, so poorly executed that, well, it's barely a movie at all. This is Steel Trap.

Dimension Extreme has been fairly reliable in the past putting out such great titles as Inside and the restored version of Night of the Living Dead. Steel Trap has a very simple premise. A premise that when propositioned to do this disc review, I gladly agreed. A group of people attending a New Year's party are all invited (via text message) to a VIP party on one of the floors below. (Before I forget, the steel trap of Steel Trap is the gigantic, abandoned, office building that the film takes place in.) Once everyone has gathered at the party, they find that they are all part of an elaborate treasure hunt game. As to be expected, once the game starts off, the players are slowly picked off one by one until the killer is revealed and the 'shocking' ending happens.

Honestly, more of a write-up just isn't fair to you. It isn't fair to anyone who reads this. The script if filled with some of the most empty-headed dialogue I've ever heard. Listening to the actors spit out these lines, it sounds like they're reading off cue cards, poorly written cue cards at that. The film itself is very low budget. Not that there is anything wrong with low budget, but as far as the production design goes, it begs the question whether any of the budget was spent on the look at all. For example, the look of the killer is extremely unoriginal. His weapon is taken from I Know What You Did Last Summer and his outfit makes him look like a member of the Blue Man Group. No joke. The actors all do what they can with what they're given, but each one of the characters is a cookie-cutter, stereotyped, two-dimensional waste of space.

The disc comes with a commentary from the co-writer/director, Luis Camara where he more or less sounds like he'd rather be doing anything else. The same goes for the embarrassing making-of featurette where all of the participating crew members all talk about how the production was rushed and how they didn't really have a complete script and that it was written in a week or something and this and that. It's painfully long, this featurette, and I could barely get through it. Especially after sitting through the entire film.

This is unfortunately a major, disastrous flop for Dimension Extreme. The cover for the DVD is even horrible. The girl pictured on the front isn't even in the movie. Honestly, save yourself the waste of time at Blockbuster and just go and rent Inside instead. The most appealing part of Steel Trap was when I took it out of my DVD player.

Steel Trap is out on DVD July 15th.