By Simon Thompson
Writer/Director James Eaves’s The Apocalypse Box is a tedious and bloated outing which manages to make its relatively short one hour and thirty minute span feel like Bridge On The River Kwai. The Apocalypse Box is the answer to the question what if Hellraiser was boring ?, It’s a movie replete with cliched characters, a predictable plot, and a complete lack of subtlety or atmosphere.
Now a lack of subtlety isn’t something that I usually mind in a horror movie if it’s by design- for example three of my favourite movies are Army Of Darkness, Big Trouble In Little China and Tremors, movies not exactly known for being subtle, but because The Apocalypse Box demands to be taken seriously as piece of political and social commentary it comes across as po-faced and pretentious.
The plot of The Apocalypse Box centres around a right-wing politician by the name of Piers Stonesmith (Tom Butcher), who is basically Enoch Powell/Nigel Farage by way of Denholm Reynholm. On the evening of a general election, he manipulates his spin doctor (Lola Knight) into trapping his Theresa May/Nicola Murray alike wife Helena ( Corrine Wicks) with six random members of the general public who’ve been lured there under false pretences.
Once they are all in the room Piers’s sinister plan is revealed with the unveiling of the titular apocalypse box, a device of both unimaginable power and danger as it is capable of granting the desires of those that touch it.
The main issue with The Apocalypse Box has to be James Eaves’s script; none of the characters ever come across as three dimensional human beings but, instead as flimsy caricatures. You have all kinds of garden-variety stock cliches such as the grumpy, alopecia-suffering Brexit dad Cyrill ( Russell Biles), the sleazy investigative journalist Ray (Jake Isaacs), and the standard disaffected Gen Z type in Tim (Jack Mariner Brown) whose dialogue mainly consists of b-roll material you might hear in an episode of Neighbours about generational disconnect.
This is a shame, because I wouldn’t call any of the cast in this movie bad actors at all, they’re just hampered by a formulaic script. The strangest addition to the cast however, is the presence of the seventh Doctor himself Sylvester McCoy, who plays the character of the newsreader relaying the consequences to the main characters of each of their choices with the box. McCoy’s appearance in this movie is truly baffling because although he’s far more famous than 99.9% of the rest of the cast he is given much less to do than any of them, with his role basically amounting to Raymond Burr’s in the American cut of the original Godzilla (1954) where a known face is brought in to spout exposition.
McCoy’s character could have worked if Eaves had structured the story to have a news crew and/or reality tv crew present within the focus group, so that McCoy’s character could have had a much more active role in the plot.
To conclude, The Apocalypse Box is a movie which doesn’t quite know whether it wants to be a fun throwback to prime Clive Barker style horror or a serious state-of-the-nation style think piece. The end result of this however, is that the movie badly suffers from tonal dissonance, which when combined with the poor pacing and shoddy script leaves a forgettable mess.
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