Very Cool!!!

Absolutely Brilliant!

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I read the above reviews, then I watched it anyway -- just to judge for myself. I thought it was really pretty suspenseful and riveting. The only thing about it that really bothered me had nothing to do with quality of film-making, storyline, acting, etc... it was the existence, and stupidity, of people who, in real life, truly are as self-centered, insensitive, careless and oblivious to what's going on around them as are a couple of the characters in this movie. I spent half the movie wanting to reach into the screen and bitch-slap them to their senses!! (lol) (But then, if a movie DOESN'T evoke strong emotions in the viewer, THAT'S when it's not worth watching.)

Excellent movie. Really gets you involved. I found myself feeling a lot of empathy for these people. Very realistic characterizations and it was refreshing to see realistic dialog. Nothing seemed contrived or false..riveting film. It reminded me a lot of Open Water and Open Water 2..with claustrophobia thrown in. Desperate race against time. The young man trapped with the two young ladies had a great plan, but he panicked and gave up too easily. He weighed down a towel with a heating stone and tried to swing it through the open portal and snag the step ladder that blocked the door. It was just inches too short. Had he asked one of the ladies to volunteer her bikini top, he could have tied it to the towel and saved them all.

This is not really a bad flick, and I can recommend it to anyone whose brain is in a rut and in need of 90 minutes of R and R. It is a lot like the Open Water movies except it involves fire instead of water. Three people are trapped in a sauna in a remote cabin when their friend staggers away, drunk and high, and passes out without realizing that he has left a ladder wedged against the door. There follows various unsuccessful attempts to escape and to call for help. I usually like to guess what people in such a movie will try next, whether some such attempt will eventually work, and whether the attempts and results make any sense. This one did give me something to think about, but I do not think it passed the sense test. The problem is they have broken a small window for air, not a bad idea. But the window is located near the sensor for the thermostat which interprets the incoming air as too low a temperature. So it cranks the heat up high enough to threaten them with heat stroke. Fooling a thermostat can be a problem. In an office building where I used to work, the thermostat in a naturally cool office once cranked the heat up enough to trip the fire alarm in another office on the same thermostat. But I think this movie had problems. Why didn't they use the towels that they had to pick up one or more of the hot rocks in the heater and hang or hold it near the temperature sensor? That should have fooled the thermostat in the opposite direction and tended to shut down the heat. I'm not sure what equilibrium temperature the room would have reached, but it should have been a lot cooler with the heater shut down most of the time. Also I don't think it likely that incoming air would have cooled the sensor without reaching the rest of the room. In fact, it seems more likely that heat would have escaped through that broken window. But this flick had compensations. Friends making such an earnest effort to understand, survive, and escape trouble can make a movie interesting. One character, Jenna, had been trapped before and was fighting the after effects while her friend, Renee, seemed at first to have it together. As the situation progresses, they switch roles as Renee comes apart while Jenna tries to get it together. Such things are hardly new in movies, but they can raise the interest level, and it was nicely done here. Also I am getting tired of movies (and here comes a major spoiler) that seem to exist just to gradually kill off the whole cast, one by one. This was a nice exception as it threatened that sort of ending right up to very late in the movie, when we find that …… well, you get the idea.

247°F is as straightforward a horror movie as you'll ever see. It's uninventive and feels like a giant missed opportunity. In fact, as the movie wears on (and on) one starts to believe that there's Something behind our protagonists' troubles - but alas, if there is, it's trivial.Most of the movie is set in a homemade sauna. Jenna, her friend Renee, Renee's boyfriend Michael, and Michael's friend Ian have zipped over to a remote island to stay in Ian's uncle's cabin for the weekend. Concurrently, it is the weekend of the May Day celebrations, apparently a big deal in the nearby towns, and Wade the uncle is involved with the setup of the festivities.We learn a few things about our main characters right away. Jenna, meant to be the protagonist, is anxious, shy, withdrawn; flashbacks show us (in the first scenes) that her fiancé' was killed in an auto accident (with Jenna beside him), and she hasn't yet fully recovered. Friend Renee is outgoing, outspoken, caring about her pal and wanting to get her out of her self-imposed shell. Michael is the typical Type A frat boy - controlling, fun loving even at the expense of others. Ian, by contrast, is sedate, passionate, thoughtful, and well spoken; weird, because he looks like the lost Winklevoss twin.The plan is for the foursome to go to this May Day pre-party, so while ol' Uncle Wade goes to set up, they head into his sauna. Then it gets too hot, so they jump in the lake. Then it's too cold, so back to the sauna. This goes on for a while. The entire time, Michael's drinking everything in sight, so you can see where this is headed. They go back to the sauna, he leaves to use the bathroom, and somehow the door gets stuck with the other three inside.The point is to see how each will react to the extreme (and rising) heat, making it less a horror film and more of a psychological freak- out. Someone's going to crack - no surprise or spoiler that it's Renee, who's painted from the get-go as more selfish than most. Ian is determined to get them all out of there - he's played pretty well by Travis Van Winkle - and Jenna just tries to get by. They all assume Michael locked them in as a prank, but after a while the story switches to his passing out and just leaving them in there.The movie could have gone in several directions. I kept expecting a twist; none came. This would have made for a predictable film, but since I naively kept thinking there was more to the story than met the eye, I didn't allow myself to become jaded. The acting is acceptable. In addition to Van Winkle, we have the redoubtable Scout Taylor-Compton (Halloween) as the high-strung Jenna turning in a wonderful performance. But they have little to work with. People do behave as you'd expect, only in the case of some (Renee, Michael), it's more of a case of melodrama than acting. Tears are shed, as is some blood. Because the movie lacks so much in substance and creativity, it's not an easily recommendable film. You have to be prepared for a lot of nothing much happening. After all, there's only so much you can do in a sauna without getting into deep psychological trauma, and the movie - although it had the opportunity - barely scratched the surface of everyone's problems. We know Jenna has issues and why, but we're unclear on how she deals with it. Would have been nice to see better character development - what does she fear now? Same for Renee; even her love for Jenna seems self serving. They've been friends forever, and Renee has an extroverted, love-life personality. Does she have demons? And does Ian do anything other than say just the right thing and be just the nicest guy ever?Who knows? Stories like this have been done to death in movies - trapped in an elevator, trapped in a mine shaft, trapped on a boat, and so on. They succeed because the plot involves you with the characters. Do we really care about the state of the relationship between Renee and Jenna? Not really, because the movie gives us no reason to do so. We like Jenna, we don't like Renee too much, and we're quite ambivalent over their long-time friendship.