[Living Hell]
Plot:Involves a military base that is being shutdown, and in the process, someone winds up exposing a forgotten biological warfare experiment. Once it gets loose and the killing begins, a man named Frank...is the only man with the knowledge on how to stop it. He then passes that knowledge on to a female soldier.

Cast:Johnathan Schaech, Erica Leerhsen.

My Thoughts:A Living Hell indeed.

Review:"Living Hell" is another in a long line of cliche driven B horror movies that just makes you wanna snatch your hair out. The film starts off with a very bloody family quarrel which a young boy witnesses between his parents, before the boy grows up, and feels called up on to warn the military of some secret organism that lives beneath one of their facilities. Played by Johnathan Schaech, this guy knows about the organism only because his mother told him about it as a kid, and basically forced him to remember it's location.

Upon his arrival at the military facility, he crosses paths with a female soldier played by Erica Leehrsen, who leads a team below to investigate the claims of Schaech's character. Of course, being that the movie has to move along somehow...and original writing apparently takes a vacation in films like this...the investigation into "what lies beneath" ends up accidentally unleashing it, and before you know it, it's running around town devouring people. Films like this really make you lose hope for B-horror movies. Which are supposed to be fun and cheesy, not excruciatingly bad, and a pain in the ass to sit through.

I really do not know how many horror films can recycle the same plot over and over again, and expect to be successful. As if the "accidental" release of this organism, which basically is nothing but mutant cgi vines wasn't cliche enough, the origin of the vines has ties to illegal and immoral U.S. military and government experimentation from back in the days of Hiroshima. No...the U.S. government is responsible? You don't say? Such a stale plot point can be seen in films such as "Bats", "Alone In The Dark", the list goes on and on and on.

The problem with this movie is, it doesn't even try to break the mold or go in a different direction from where you'd expect it to go. The organism escapes, it kills a few people, two people who are smarter than everyone else end up being the ones who have to save the day by doing something brave, and they have to get it done before the military bombs the town into the stone age to disavow any knowledge of the experiment. "Yawn".....nothing new here, nothing new here at all.

If there's any bright spot to this lackluster mess of a film, it's Erica Leehrsen's performance. She's maturing into quite a good actress with each new film that she does, and in the hororr genre, a genre which goes with the safe bet most of the time, rather than thinking outside the box...it's really tough to mature at all, but she's doing it. Hopefully she will soon appear in better indie horror pics than this one, but if she can carry this disaster then she definitely has talent that will only become more honed and perfected as her career moves on.

"Living Hell" is not a SCI-FI original picture, but it did premier on the SCI-FI Channel, and was so bad...you'd think it was a SCI-FI original. This film is one movie I'd advise horror fans to stay away from unless you're madly in love with Erica Leehrsen, or for the girls....if you're a major fan of Jonathan Schaech, or if you're one of those SCI-FI/Horror geeks who loves military-experiment-gone-wrong movies and just can't get enoguh of them, no matter how cheesy, bad, or boring they are. "Living Hell" is a terrible picture, that relies on too much of the old, and not enough of the new.

Positives:Erica Leehrsen's performance.

Negatives:The plot was stale, recycled, and utterly boring. Jonathan Schaech wasn't as good as he usually is, the supporting cast was horrible.

Overall:Woefully bad.





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