As Above, So Below

2014’s dearth of decent scary movies continues with As Above, So Below; a movie so lacking in originality it might as well be called Now This Is What You Call Horror, with the hits replaced with tired clichés we've seen again and again.

First up we’ve got Scarlett (Perdita Weeks), who is attempting to discover The Philosopher’s Stone (seriously?) and prove that her father wasn't a crazy man for thinking it existed. She convinces a group of documentarians, as well as some tunnel divers (that’s a thing?), to head down into the catacombs below the streets of Paris, as she’s certain that’s where the Stone is going to be. A quick cave-in later and we’re in The Descent territory, mixed with the found footage format of Quarantine, the your-worst-fears-realized idea from It, and most bizarrely, moments of The Da Vinci Code.

For the first hour of its running time, As Above, So Below is laughably, hysterically bad. People enter rooms with statements like “We’re the first people in 500 years to be in this room”, happen across a dead body, and ask “Is he alive?” When one of the tunnels begins to rumble loudly, and the ceiling above them begins to crack in half, someone asks “Is that bad?” When a fellow tunnel diver (seriously, that’s a thing??) has been missing for two years, then suddenly reappears all dead eyed and creepy, they don’t give a second thought to following him.

These scenes are interspersed with Scarlett pretending to be Lara Croft, solving ancient puzzles in between Krav Maga’ing demons in the face. One particular riddle, which sees Scarlett work out that a scarab symbol means she needs to pull the 7th rock down in the wall has got to be considered for funniest scene of the year.

Then, just as your defenses are down and you've been lulled into thinking the rest of the movie is going to be irredeemably crap, suddenly there’s proper, effective jump scares littered throughout the last half hour, which helps end things on something of a high.

The best two star movie you’ll see this year.