Nine friends spend their holiday at a home on a private island. They discover a dice game and play together. However, the relaxing game turns into the dying game as it reveal the worst in each of them.
There's relief in this type of poorly acted claptrap's adherence to movie mathematics, since each slain character is a sign that the movie is that much closer to a credit roll.
Derivative and about as exciting as a checkers tournament (albeit one where the inevitable chainsaw makes a blood spattering appearance), this pallid horror movie is bloody but not even remotely scary.
Pacing remains flat, exacerbated by bad dialogue, some subpar f/x and variable perfs.
Cinefantastique
April 09, 2010
A Warning to the Curious: Don't let the would-be evocative title fool you into thinking that [this] is anything other than a routine (nay, outdated) splatter film.
Feckless young people play a cursed board game that unleashes repressed desires, rips the scabs off festering wounds and brings seething resentments to a boil: Predictable slasher mayhem ensues.
Watching people play a board game ain't ever going to be scary, and that's essentially what we have here -- after a laughably amateurish intro set in the 1920s, when the dice and cards are unearthed (in Turkey).
FEARnet
April 09, 2010
A weird, talky, fairly sloppy mess of a low-budget genre flick ... but at least it gets good towards the end.
the ongoing slaughter is just so much screen time that passes so dully as to qualify as audience torture worse than anything these characters suffer, and their suffering involves a chainsaw at one point
Give the movie a little credit for coming up with the idea of an ancient monster. And the design of the game is terrific. But this is just Jumanji with gore effects and topless scenes.
