Yup, it was supposed to be late 2009, then MGM pushed it back to 2010 to allow for a 3D conversion (which thankfully never happened), and that delay allowed it to get caught up in the insolvency wrangles etc.

Ok, so as a non-horror viewer I got none of the references and am relying on everyone else to show me the cleverness. Were the redneck torture zombies themselves a nod to/combination of anything in particular - I've seen people referencing Evil Dead a lot, but were they a direct lift or just a joyful example of…

@avclub-964bc1c4246b6a9d8afaa820e8fdc519:disqus yeah, exactly. All this spoilerphobic internet hype kind of made me expect sudden twists, but instead there was just a gradual reveal of what was going on, paced almost perfectly for you to take in and extrapolate where we were going just in time to get there. (Until the…

Ah, it'll be Buenos Aires that was stored in my head as 'dead King Kong on the ground?' then, I think.

I don't really watch any straight horror because I don't like it, but I guess I've seen enough previous parodies and black comedies that I could still appreciate most of the directing/editing homages or subversions - just not the individual moster homages to various franchises as discussed above. And I knew going in…

Hah, and yes to the big red button which just happens to have no override at all. Of course there'd be one.

And a moose!

It's kind of amusing to me how his character's almost the inverse - instead of being one of the bad guys orchestrating things but eventually sacrificing himself to save the world, here he's one of the harmless guys on the receiving end of the bad and refuses to die for a species that could do that to itself.…

But at that point, he still believed everything had been successful and everyone that mattered was dead, so he wouldn't be worried about anyone escaping any more. I could buy though that his look of concern was simply for the fact that any of the players on the killing floor had been able to upset the game mechanisms…

Hmm, okay, yes, that could work. And yes, that mention is immediately before the reveal of his survival so in fact it could have been meant to draw a direct link there and I just didn't see it.

Aha! That's whose it was. I couldn't remember. Bad respondent me. :)

Wow. Fancy predicting some lottery numbers for me? ;)

There's definitely no "hey, let's film a guy getting realistically hacked up." I personally can't draw comparisons to the Saw or Hostel kind of thing since I stay the hell away from them, but this is nowhere near on a torture porn level. The violence is reasonably sudden, not drawn out, and although there's plenty of…

Okay, the plot thread I'd like to investigate further: the power glitch that Maintenance reported which left the tunnel open. They said that it came from 'Upstairs,' at which point Bradley Whitford got a really worried look on his face. The phonecall which one would assume was from his superiors, though, then alerted…

Yeah, I'm not sure about this. Obviously his return was great and I loved his acting in the final act so I'm more than happy with it, but the best explanation I can come up with is that however those outlines were filled with blood, it merely seemed to require that that person's blood had been spilled within the…

Aww. Thank you! I was just being curmudgeonly, really. But I was in my first stages of getting my thoughts out so it's nice to have them here so I can refer to them when my friends have seen the film and I want to remember what I thought immediately after seeing it.

Didn't Sigourney Weaver even have a line at the end about 'we take what we can get these days'?

I really want to know what went wrong in Sweden. And what were the other places shown on the cameras?

I had one on the review comments section before it got deleted. (Edit: aha! And it has now been copied across, so if you want a longer, ramblier attempt to explain the film, see further down the page.) It's kind of hard to be matter-of-fact (or succinct) since the plot really kind of isn't matter of fact.

You're probably not far wrong if that's your experience of other Whedon projects since Buffy. Some characters have very Joss-y dialogue (notably the nerdier characters), others are much more straightforward, but the film definitely tries to have its self-aware cake and eat it… and act 3 could definitely be seen as the…