The Only Puzzle Is Why This Movie Exists
There are bad horror movies, and then there’s Escape Room (2018), a film so painfully uninspired that it makes you wish you could escape—from your own living room, from your streaming service, from existence itself. Directed by Peter Dukes and starring a visibly exhausted Skeet Ulrich (who looks like he’s wondering if his Scream royalties could cover therapy), Escape Room is a horror film about people trapped in a deadly game that somehow manages to trap its audience in something far worse: 86 minutes of cinematic purgatory.
This movie is the cinematic equivalent of a broken Rubik’s cube—cheap, frustrating, and impossible to care about.
“Haunted Box” Plot Twist: It’s Actually Just a Terrible Movie
The premise, on paper, sounds promising: a horror-themed escape room gets an “upgrade” when its owner, Brice (Ulrich), adds a cursed demonic box as a prop. The problem is that the movie’s budget is roughly equivalent to the cost of that box, and possibly purchased from the same antique store that sells bad CGI and expired plotlines.
So Brice proudly installs the box in his attraction, despite every glowing neon sign screaming “Do Not Touch Ancient Demon Containers.” Four unlucky contestants enter the room, expecting puzzles and jump scares, only to discover that the real horror is being stuck in a film written by someone who once read the back of a Ouija board box and thought, “This could be art.”
The box, of course, is evil—because all antique boxes in horror films are legally required to be. Once it’s opened, a demon awakens, kills the cast one by one, and presumably collects their SAG-AFTRA cards as trophies.
Characters So Flat They Could Slide Under the Door
The ensemble of doomed escapees includes every horror cliché in human form:
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Jess (Christine Donlon): The Final Girl™, who spends most of her screen time staring at things with mild concern.
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Jeff (Randy Wayne): The macho idiot whose personality is 90% tank top, 10% shouting.
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Ben (Matt McVay): The nerd who exists solely to read exposition aloud.
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Angie (Ashley Gallegos): The friend whose job is to die first so the others can realize the stakes.
Their dialogue sounds like it was generated by ChatGPT after being locked in an actual escape room for three days with only a bag of Funyuns and a VHS copy of Saw V. Every line is either, “What’s happening?” or, “We need to get out of here!”—a poetic refrain that could double as the audience’s collective cry for help.
Even Sean Young shows up (yes, Blade Runner’s Sean Young!) as Ramona, the antique shop owner who sells Brice the demon box. She delivers her lines with all the enthusiasm of a DMV employee explaining how to renew your driver’s license. You can practically see her counting down the minutes until she can leave set and collect her paycheck.
Skeet Ulrich Deserves a Medal for Surviving This
Poor Skeet Ulrich. Once the brooding heartthrob of Scream, now reduced to managing a budget horror escape room and fighting a CGI demon that looks like it escaped from Microsoft Paint. His character, Brice, is supposed to be a struggling entrepreneur haunted by ambition. What we actually get is a man who looks perpetually one yawn away from death.
There’s a certain tragic poetry in watching Ulrich try to sell his dialogue with straight-faced intensity while staring at a glowing box that probably cost $14 to make. You can tell he’s trying. He squints. He yells. He even furrows his brow like he’s seen demons before—maybe in his career choices. But no amount of brooding can save a script that feels like it was written during a Red Bull hangover.
A Horror Movie That Forgets to Be Scary
Let’s talk about the “horror” aspect. Because despite being marketed as one, Escape Room is about as frightening as a malfunctioning smoke detector. The scares are limited to dim lighting, awkward close-ups, and the occasional whispery demon voice that sounds like it was recorded inside a tin can.
Jump scares? None worth mentioning. Gore? Barely enough ketchup to cover a hot dog. Atmosphere? Imagine an escape room inside a storage unit lit by a single Home Depot bulb.
At one point, the camera pans dramatically toward a wall covered in scribbles, as though the cinematographer expected us to faint from the sheer terror of… Sharpie graffiti.
The demon—if you can call it that—is never truly visible. Perhaps because the special effects department ran out of budget halfway through and just decided to imply its existence via sound design and bad acting. The result is a villain so forgettable you half expect it to apologize for interrupting.
The Real Puzzle: Who Edited This Movie?
The pacing of Escape Room is a miracle of modern anti-craftsmanship. It somehow manages to be both glacially slow and chaotically incoherent. Scenes linger on blank walls for too long, dialogue loops back on itself, and the editing feels like it was done by a sleep-deprived raccoon.
Characters teleport across rooms mid-conversation. The lighting changes between shots like the film can’t decide if it’s night or day. And the demon’s “possession” sequences are so poorly cut that you might think your TV’s buffering.
It’s a cinematic fever dream—but not the good kind. More like the one you get after eating expired shrimp.
Escape Room Logic: Everyone’s Stupid, Everything’s Dumb
Here’s a fun drinking game: take a shot every time someone makes an obviously terrible decision. You’ll be dead before the first act ends.
Brice buys a clearly cursed object. The players ignore every supernatural sign. A possessed person literally telegraphstheir evil turn, and everyone reacts with the energy of people realizing they left the oven on.
At one point, someone finds blood dripping from the ceiling and says, “Maybe it’s part of the game.” Yes, Karen, because all good escape rooms feature arterial spray as part of the challenge.
The movie’s big moral seems to be: If you ignore red flags long enough, the devil will murder you and you’ll deserve it.
When Even the Demon Looks Bored
It’s never a good sign when your movie’s supernatural entity seems as disinterested as the audience. The demonic box—ostensibly the film’s centerpiece—doesn’t even have the courtesy to look menacing. It just sits there, occasionally glowing like a malfunctioning lava lamp.
When it finally “possesses” someone, the effect is less “terrifying transformation” and more “mild food poisoning.” The victims stumble around, moan a bit, and then die unceremoniously. You half expect the demon to file for unemployment halfway through.
The Ending: Freedom Is Overrated
By the time the survivors finally “escape,” you’ll wish they hadn’t. The climax plays out like a student film version of The Exorcist—but with worse lighting and less conviction. There’s a half-hearted twist, a few mumbled lines about evil never dying, and then the movie just… stops.
Not ends. Stops. Like the editor got tired and hit “save.”
Final Thoughts: The Real Horror Is the Runtime
Escape Room (2018) isn’t just bad—it’s aggressively unmemorable. It’s the cinematic equivalent of an IKEA instruction manual for Satan’s toy chest. Nothing fits, everything’s flimsy, and halfway through you realize you’ve made a huge mistake.
The film had potential—a cursed prop, a confined setting, a desperate cast—but instead, it delivers a lazy, soulless, Redbox-tier disaster. It’s not scary, not suspenseful, and not even so-bad-it’s-good. It’s just… beige.
If you’re looking for a horror movie about escape rooms, there are at least two others from the same year that do it better. If you’re looking for an actual escape, however, might I suggest the “Stop” button on your remote?
Verdict: ★☆☆☆☆
A film so bland even the demon gave up halfway through. The scariest part is realizing Skeet Ulrich had to act in this thing. The real escape room is surviving the entire runtime.
