Hey, this is Colin French. I’m a  pessimist, satirist, and an underachiever  as well as a former Canadian Studies major. I’ll be doing mostly Canadian films, and if at some point one slips in here that isn’t entirely made-in-Canada, well, then that just means you’re paying attention. Its a win-win situation. Each movie is somebody’s baby, and they all deserve a fair shot. So pop open some cold ones, and take off, all you hosers, to the Great White North of the movie world.

The Corridor

Too often in the modern movie industry does a mix of low budgeting and a C actor cast mix poorly with artistic, and often over-ambitious storytelling. The Corridor, a Nova Scotia film, might have fallen into the same trap; there is often a great deal of difficulty in combining science fiction, borderline spirituality, and modern relevance, while trying to keep it, as a horror movie, sufficiently believable to be creepy and keeping the audience on edge throughout. Considering the long odds stacked against it, this movie does sufficiently better than it should, and is certainly worth at least middling placement on your Netflix to-watch list.

The story revolves around a group of five friends trying to rebuild their once close relationship by spending a weekend together in –you guessed it- a cabin in the woods. The movie attempts, somewhat weakly, an element of current relevance by making the main characters stereotypical mid-20’s generation Y-ers. That is to say, recent graduates, living with their parents, still not really knowing their lot in life. The cast suffers from a lack of not only prominent female characters but general diversity in terms of character type. If the movie was marketed towards 20-something males, then it was poorly presented as it is highly unlikely that single unemployed men want to watch a movie about themselves, without at least the presence of a female character or two.

The movie succeeds, however, in channeling the kind of close, but stressed, friendship model that is seen in other supernatural thrillers such ala Dreamcatcher. This movie isn’t quite at that level, but many of the same ideas are present, and it lacks the kind of pointless jump moments and over the top violence of most modern wide-appeal horror films that we know so well. Sure, The Corridor has the CGI of a made-for-SCYFY original horror flick. Sure it takes an hour to get into the action of a movie that lasts less than a half hour. But if the bar has been lowered- which it has- for the high budget mainstream horror movies that we now see, then The Corridor certainly deserves, as a cheap independent movie, a shout-out for effort and to some degree, execution in providing a mildly entertaining evening, at the cost of nothing but your time.