The all-stars setup, as insanely convoluted as it might be, allows the film to leap over hurdles that too often prove troublesome for groups-in-jeopardy horrors. But Minos has other plans and before they have time to realise, they’re back in another snuff game with some understandably exhausted players. Zoey is eager for revenge and so takes Ben on a trip to New York, where some mysterious co-ordinates will allegedly lead them to the big boss headquarters. Zoey (Taylor Russell) and Ben (Logan Miller) made it out of their booby-trapped maze unscathed but have been left haunted by what they saw and what was done to them. A sequel was inevitable (it ended with an ambitious tease of what was next) and so here it comes, bounding in with the same infectious energy as the first, albeit dragged down by a rather laughably unscary new game show subtitle – Escape Room: Tournament of Champions.Īs that suggests, this time we’re dealing with the best of the best, a cherrypicked group of Escape Room survivors, those who have outsmarted the evil corporation of Minos that the first film introduced in its mask-slip finale. Such cursed backstory meant that when 2019’s token sacrificial lamb Escape Room came out, the most shocking thing wasn’t that it made $155m globally from a budget of just $9m but that it was actually kind of sort of good?īeyond its opportunistic title and Cube meets Saw meets every other film that has since copied Cube and Saw premise, it was a surprisingly inventive and genuinely fun little B-movie, a quick, unpretentious blast of PG-13 death and destruction that raised a below ground bar just slightly above surface. Dross like Texas Chainsaw 3D, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones and Insidious: The Last Key made money despite loathsome reviews, partly because they were mostly tossed out without press being able to actually write about them first, screenings non-existent (this strange trend is analysed nicely in an AV Club podcast episode).
Ever since 2012 saw Paramount chuck toxic found footage shocker The Devil Inside into the wild and make $33m in its opening weekend (from a $1m budget), studios have found audiences more then willing to cough up their Christmas money for equally heinous product.