Day 7 of 365: Cube

Some friends of mine just watched Cube for the first time but I think I stumbled across this back when I worked at a video store. Years before Saw started torture porning people to death, you had this enigmatic little Canadian indie movie about assorted people waking up inside a cube room. There are exits on every surface, each leading to another cube room. Some rooms have death traps, others are just empty rooms. The more the group tries to work out the why and the how and the what, the less they end up knowing as the whole thing is designed to confuse and, ultimately, kill you. There is no gloating voice over a loud speaker and no watchers make their presence known, it is just the ever-dwindling group who woke up together and the infernal device in which they are trapped. What is nice about blank canvas movies like this is that you can project all sorts of theories onto them. Is the cube a metaphor for religious sin and punishment? An experiment gone wrong? Is it just life itself?

There is plenty of gore and horror to keep genre fans happy. I'm not sure why I've never seen any of the sequels but I think it is because I am afraid they will explain too much. All in all, I would give this a B.