Review of Coffin

Coffin (2011)
1/10
I thought it was one of the most boring films I have seen.
5 August 2012
Warning: Spoilers
Coffin is set in Los Angeles where a woman named Rona Samms (Sunny Doench) & her lover Sean Justice (Kevin Sorbo) both wake up to find themselves trapped inside a wooden coffin, presumably buried underground. They have a lighter for light, a phone which will only accept incoming calls, a video camera so everything they do & say can be seen & only seventy five minutes worth of air. Businessman Jack Samms (Patrick Barnitt) arrives home to find a masked man who calls himself Trick (Johnny Alonso) waiting for him inside, Trick explains that he has kidnapped his wife Rona & the man she is having an affair with & buried them in a coffin, he show's Jack live footage from inside the coffin of Rona & Sean terrified & struggling. Trick demands that Jack pay him a huge ransom to save the two or they will suffocate within seventy five minutes, Jack is left with no options but he is almost broke & has little to offer so has to play Trik at his own game & try to get the upper hand in order to save Rona & Sean...

Directed by Kipp Tribble who also wrote, co-produced & has a small role in it as someone called Scott along with Derik Wingo who is also credited as a producer & a small role playing a character called Epperson this seems to be thought of as a horror film but in reality I would say Coffin is much more of a thriller & not a very good one either. The main problem I had was just how boring it was, even though Coffin only lasts for 85 minutes it doesn't half drag & is so bland & dull that I found myself losing interest several times. How I made it through to the end I'll never know. There's never enough tension or suspense, Coffin is just rather dry & routine to really stand out. The one half decent aspect of Coffin is the twist ending which is alright actually, I didn't see it coming & while it's poorly handled & fails to save the film overall it is at least fairly memorable & in a way quite clever. I suspect that the problem with Coffin is that someone had the idea for the twist ending & thought it was cool but then had the almost impossible task of writing over an hour's worth of padding to proceed it in order to stretch it out to to a full feature length film. Maybe Coffin would have been much better if it had been a 30 minute television program with a breathless pace which would lead up to the twist. The character's are poor, they are either unlikable or badly written, the bad guy is laughable & elicits no menace at all, the two cop's are annoying & the victims trapped inside the coffin are so unlikable you actually wish they would run out of air & just die.

Coffin looks like it was made for television with a very cheap feel to it, very average hand-held type feel to the photography & boring locations. There's absolutely zero gore or nudity in it, there's no sense of humour & not much profanity either in what it a pretty tame & restrained film. The film never really manages to build any momentum or tension to the plight of the character's or the situations, it all feels so staged & a bit half hearted.

With a supposed budget of about $600,000 this had a pretty low budget & it show's, filmed in Los Angeles. The acting isn't great although the cast is better than one may expect, Hercules man Kevin Sorbo, Bruce Davidson from the likes of General Hospital & X2 (2003)& the rest of the cast seem to have a fair amount of acting credits behind them as well.

Coffin is a mystery thriller that never manages to to be thrilling, I just thought it was a pretty dull & boring film I found it impossible to get into, the twist ending did impress me a bit & I liked that but by the time it comes it's far too little far too late.
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