Was ok

I caught the last 30 mins or so of this film on the Horror Channel in the early hours of this morning when I was browsing through Freeview. I'm no fan of slasher movies, or even horror movies in general. However, when I came across the film two young men were locked in a smoke-filled room with no ventilation and apparently about to die from asphyxiation, so I watched what was left of it. I can't judge the whole film on what I saw, but I had a mixed reaction to that.

Of course, the basic plot - a group of people in a large building being threatened by a killer on the loose - is a very old one, going all the way back to John Willard's 1922 play 'The Cat and the Canary' at least, via J B Priestley's 1927 novel 'Benighted/The Old Dark House', and Agatha Christie's 1939 novel 'And Then There Were None/Ten Little Indians' and her 1952 play 'The Mousetrap'. (The first three have been filmed several times.)

But I agree that the surprise ending looked good - at least at first. On reflection, however, it starts to unravel. At first it seems like poetic justice for the selfish Lloyd, who abandons his manfriend Col to the killer to save himself and his pregnant girlfriend Jemma - when, if he'd helped Col, all three of them could have been saved. The police hold Lloyd as a suspect in all the murders that they discover in the building, and Jemma is unable to clear him while drifting in and out of consciousness during labour. Then it appears that the killer has not only survived the fire in the building but is posing as a cleaner in the hospital labour ward and is probably about to kill Jemma, leaving Lloyd with no witness to clear him.

But given time to think afterwards, you realise that if the killer murders - or even kidnaps - Jemma the police will know that Lloyd couldn't be responsible, since they have him in custody in the station. This will lend credence to Lloyd's defence. At least it would if the police don't continue to behave in the absymally stupid way that they have been behaving. Why should they arrest the man that they've seen carrying a pregnant woman to safety from a burning building? Why should they subject him to an apparently brutal interrogation? Why don't they wait until Jemma has given birth and can be interviewed, have officers on watch in the hospital, and let Lloyd remain close to her? (We know that he wouldn't run away, and they had no reason to think that he would.) Is it because he's black and she's white? When we think of recent dismal events in the US, that doesn't seem so improbable - even for the UK.