Movie Review: The Task

Synopsis: A group of unlucky reality show contestants must survive the night in a haunted prison.

Anybody remember the old MTV reality show called "Fear"? Where they put a group of kids in a supposedly haunted location and had them perform tasks? That's essentially what this is, with a dash of the movie Cry Wolf (2005) perhaps. It's about as boring as that MTV show was with the same cardboard characters and lack of much action sadly. Cool premise, poor execution.

And it's rated R for "Rated R for violence and language" but I'm not sure why. You could remove about 1 bloody scene and a few words and it would probably be PG-13, or hell maybe even PG. There's no nudity, very little gore and very few chills or thrills, just a whole lot of nothing. If you're going for an R rating you might as well crank up the gore and craziness or else just cut it back to a PG-13. Really, what's the point?

The poster on the right has the cool looking clown in it, but the only time you see that evil looking bastard is on a TV giving instructions, sort of like Billy The Puppet in the Saw series. What a waste of potential creepiness ala Stephen King's It.

The film does have a decent set design and good location and setting, it just doesn't really use it to the full effect. Or even close. A few of the characters might be interesting if we knew anything about them, but character development is pretty non-existent here.

They try for a few twists at the end but none of it worked for me and seemed rushed.

I've seen nearly all of the 40-or-so After Dark movies for their 5 years and this is in my bottom 5 easily.

3/10