She does well here, but her costars are unfortunately stuck with underwritten roles. She does much of the heavy-lifting, tracking Keira’s grief as it morphs into resolve as the film slowly but surely makes its way to the big climax. The Cellar is Cuthbert’s film, and it’s refreshing to see the actress return to the genre after a 15-year absence (her last horror film was 2007’s Captivity). The rest of the film follows Keira as she hunts for her daughter and unravels the mystery of the house and its previous owners. By using the short as a jumping-off point for the story (it’s essentially remade with the new cast in a scene that takes place 20 minutes into the film), The Cellar is able to do away with the short’s content early on and focus on being able to stand on its own. Keira must then battle with the entity occupying her house’s cellar, or risk losing her daughter forever.Īdapted from Muldowney’s 2004 short film The Ten Steps ( watch here), The Cellar thankfully avoids the criticism that plagues so many features adapted from short films: mainly that they feel like shorts stretched to feature length. After a number of strange supernatural experiences, she comes to the conclusion that the house took Ellie. Ellie’s mother Keira ( Elisha Cuthbert, House of Wax) investigates and finds that the walls have strange symbols engraved into them. Brendan Muldowney‘s The Cellar aims to remedy that with a dark, moody and somber film that emphasizes atmosphere over gore, making for a (mostly) family-friendly viewing experience that unfortunately feels all too familiar.Ībout a week after the Woods family moves into an old house in the Irish countryside, their daughter Ellie ( Abby Fitz) goes missing during a power outage. We’ve had films like Monster House, Coraline and Joe Dante’s under-seen The Hole, but nothing really in the same vein as something like Gremlins or The Witches, which actually tried to frighten their younger viewers. Popular IPs like Goosebumps have been adapted into films that emphasize comedy over horror, and it’s nigh impossible to find any original family horror films getting released nowadays. The only thing I’d do differently is make good use of their cafe now that I know they have one.Family horror is a sub-genre that hasn’t really been given its due in recent years. Off the Beaten Shelf once tried to squish a bug with a book and I screamed more over that than I did about the spider that was trying to crawl into bed with us.Īll in all, I had a lovely time at The Book Cellar. I mean, I assume they wouldn’t have to put up a sign like that if there weren’t people doing it, but I’m just like, what the hell kind of heathens are coming into The Book Cellar?! I’m definitely that person who, if I saw someone use a book as a coaster or a plate, would calmly move the food off of it, dust off the book, and give the person a dirty look. I also couldn’t help noticing the sign above the puzzle shelf that says “Dear Friends, we don’t have coasters, so please be sure to keep food and drinks off the books” and I must ask WHAT GODLESS MONSTER IS PUTTING FOOD AND DRINKS ON THE BOOKS? But between my antsy-ness and having 5 cats that like to swat small things, puzzles are a fruitless venture for me. If I had the patience for puzzles I might have gotten one. The Book Cellar had several cool-looking literary-themed puzzles. No bookstore is complete without a puzzle section, am I right? I don’t really know how books and puzzles got so intertwined (are there book publishers who also make puzzles? do book distributors also distribute puzzles? is this a way of capturing the audiobook audience without necessarily having to sell audiobooks?) but puzzles in bookstores is pretty ubiquitous.
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