Sadly Over-hyped

Just what I expected

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

With its haunted house and ghosts trapped in a cyclic dark past, 7 Below desperately wants to be Kubrick's The Shining. And who can blame it? Sadly, the result is worthless, never scary or exciting.And very poorly written. It features an inordinate amount of scenes with people sitting in dark rooms and chatting the night away. Unless you have a knack for dialogues to rival Tarantino's, this is always a bad idea. Conversations should develop characters while ratcheting up the tension AND telling the story. People sitting around and blabbering about how afraid they are (or revealing their unhappy past) is not a scene - it's filler between a jump scare and another.Compare with James Mangold's Identity, a movie with a similar scenario (and a comparably silly twist), which is however stylish and cinematic, always propelled towards the next set-piece, featuring crisp dialogue and active characters who are constantly doing something: searching for clues, escaping, organizing a defense against the mysterious threat, putting together the pieces of the puzzle. A passive character morosely waiting for something to happen (or for cheesy revelations to be tossed at him) is a recipe for boredom.Ving Rhames and a drowsy Val Kilmer cash their checks, the latter for probably like two days on set.3/10

You can usually surmise after watching the first 15 or 20 minutes of a movie what you are in for, and 7 Below is no exception. The film is listed as a Horror/Thriller, but trust me, it should be rated as a DULLER because it is just slow moving and oh, so predictable. We have a couple of name actors in the film such as Val Kilmer, Ving Rhames and Luke Goss. But these actors cannot bring a dull script to life, let alone some 100 plus year old corpses who were murdered more than a century ago. The plot is about a family of four that is murdered by the young son, and how Ving Rhames fits in to the picture is just plain dumb. I won't spoil the so called plot for you, but to suffice to say by the end of the movie (if you get that far) you will be scratching your head, and asking yourself "Really?" "Come On!"The score I found irritating and the constantly dark sequences and thunder and rain outside is monotonous after the first half hour. The only good thing I can say that caught my attention was the artwork on the DVD cover. I gave it a 2 out of 10. Viewer beware, this film may put you to sleep.

I'll admit the acting was okay, the story was a bit weak and nonsensical at some points, but overall I enjoyed it. It didn't seem like the movie had that huge of a budget, so it seems like they did the best they could with what they had. I watched the movie on Netflix, not in theaters, so I guess people are upset they paid to see it and I understand. This certainly wasn't an edge-of-your-seat type movie, it progressed pretty slowly.I paid attention and caught three goofs IMDb didn't: 1. The house had a tin roof, and despite being in such a huge storm, you never hear the rain on it. 2. The grandfather clock is pendulum-driven, yet the "tick-tock" sound is from that of a small clock or a pocket watch. The chime is from that exact clock though. I own the same one. 3. Even though the storm hasn't even started yet, a tree had fallen in the road and barriers were placed around it sometime between when Courtney drove through and when she was picked up (which probably wasn't very long).

There seems to have been some confusion about the meaning of the title to this film, with viewers quite understandably (but wrongly) assuming that it somehow relates to a sub-zero temperature. My understanding is that the number refers to the seven people that we see at the beginning of the film—the six people in the van, and the cashier at the garage—and that the word 'below' alludes to the perpetual 'hell' in which they are trapped, which in this instance is an eternity in the presence of Ving Rhames and Val Kilmer as they give possibly the worst performances of their careers.Not that Rhames and Kilmer are the only ones at fault in this unmitigated supernatural disaster: the majority of the blame must go to writer/director Kevin Carraway, who clearly had no idea how to develop his script beyond its trite 'we're all doomed to repeat our torment forever' initial concept, the result of which is an hour and a half of utter nonsense (filled with terrible characters and risible dialogue). If the driving force behind the whole film is unable to adequately explain what the hell is going on, then what chance do the cast have? And, consequently, what chance do the viewers have? Suffice to say that the film is incredibly dull, very frustrating and leaves many questions unanswered, the most obvious being 'How the hell did this garbage ever get made?'.N.B. Two of the prop newspapers have grammatical errors in their headlines; they couldn't even get that right!