The Cellar Door movie starts with a woman chained up and bloody in a basement. She escapes and almost makes it to the highway before being murdered by her tormentor and buried in an abandoned field. A short time later, a woman named Ruby is kidnapped after passing out drunk in her home and wakes up in a small box in the same cellar. Surrounded by terrible vicious instruments and blood-stained walls, her tormentor, a man named Herman…does absolutely nothing to her.
Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. Herman feeds her, gives her water, buys her feminine products, asks a cashier what kind of food a woman would like, bakes her a cake, and reads her a story.
Wow, what a fiend.
In fact, I am really glad we have that scene in the beginning, because the next time we see anything remotely horrifying is fifty-two minutes into this movie. Herman is polite, does not take advantage of Ruby in any way, and basically does whatever she asks in the hope that she will eventually love him. The only time he tends to go a little crazy is when someone makes fun of him, which unfortunately Ruby does once or twice.
As a B-movie, I have to confess this one is better than average, and a lot of that credit goes to the actress, Michelle Tomlinson. As a sexy damsel in distress, she plays this role very well, and when she finally gets out of the cage, she faces Herman in such a way that by the end she could easily be a far superior serial killer. Unfortunately, like most B-movie films, there are a few technical problems.
Oh good morning, film crew! I didn’t realize you were in this movie.
There are a couple of other obvious problems. In one scene, Herman intentionally starves Ruby. She looks at a bucket which is quickly dripping water. An unknown length of time passes and Ruby is begging Herman for food, and…the bucket isn’t even overflowing, even though that faucet is dripping really fast. Sometime’s Ruby’s hair is frizzy, and other times it is perfectly combed. Another problem is that Ruby sometimes has dreams of the girl at the start of the movie who died…including details about her murder and burial Ruby couldn’t possibly know. It’s like she had access to a script or something.
FINAL GRADE: 2 1/2 out of 5. This is not a gory movie, or a psychological horror. I’m not quite sure what it is, but this movie is still better than I expected.
I'm not entirely convinced that Ruby can't escape out of the huge gaping hole in the bottom of her cell, which seems to change sizes during scenes.
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