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10 Cloverfield Lane | 2016 | PG-13 | - 2.6.5
After leaving her boyfriend and surviving a car accident, a woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wakes up in a concrete block basement. She believes she was abducted by an unhinged survivalist (John Goodman) but he insists that he saved her life when the outside world was destroyed by a chemical or nuclear attack. Uncertain and afraid, she plans to escape, no matter what she will face outside. Also with John Gallagher, Jr., Mat Vairo, Cindy Hogan and Jamie Clay. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg. [1:45]
SEX/NUDITY 2 - Throughout the film a woman wears a tight white tank top with a black bra beneath it and shows some cleavage. Wd see a photo of a woman in a bikini in a magazine.
► An older man in a bunker tells a young woman, "It's just you and me now." A man tries to steady a woman who nearly fell and another man says, "Keep your hands to yourself. No touching!"
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VIOLENCE/GORE 6 - A man demands to know what another man and a woman were doing with scissors and threatens to dissolve the people in acid; the other man fakes a confession of planning to make a weapon and apologizes as the camera focuses on the first man, who points a handgun off-screen and shoots the other man (we see only a long line of blood spatter on the wall); we later see blood and the shirt the dead man was wearing as it is dissolving in a barrel of acid.
► A woman and a man argue about respect as he backs her up against a wall until the argument ends and they sit at a dinner table where she slams a bottle of soda into the forehead of the man and runs from him (we do not see any the bottle break); he later asks her to sew up a two-inch gash on his forehead and she uses a curved needle to sew the first stitch in close-up and the wound is seen to be closed neatly later and then a gauze square with a spot of blood is seen covering it.
► A woman makes a hazard suit and gas mask from a rubber shower curtain, a 2-liter bottle and other household items until a man finds it and shouts at her; she locks him in her room with a heavy metal door and runs upstairs until he escapes and follows her, she kicks a barrel of acid onto him and he shouts in pain, gags and chokes and when the acid spreads on the floor a short in a lamp cord ignites it as the man comes at her with half of his face looking red and raw; she climbs through ductwork and he stabs four knives through the bottom and side of the duct, but misses her, he grabs her ankle and she kicks him away, and she overturns tall shelves of heavy cans of food onto him and escapes.
► We see a man dead on the floor on his side with his face and one arm red and raw looking. A woman drives on a highway at night and we hear a loud crash and she grunts as we see the car spin around several times; we hear crunching metal and shattering glass and then the camera zooms back and we see the car pass through a guard rail and flip onto its roof on a grassy area below; the camera cuts to her face as she awakens in a basement on a thin mattress, her cheek and forehead scraped and scabbing with an IV in her arm (she yanks it out and we do not see blood on the needle), her hand is scraped and her knee is in a long brace that is chained and padlocked to the wall as she struggles and cries with bloodshot eyes.
► A lizard-like head covered in scales that light up peaks around the back of a car, makes a sound like a growl and warbles as another such head approaches a building and a car and twice pokes out a fleshy mouth-like part with lamprey-like circles of teeth and then retracts them. A farmhouse erupts in a loud explosion, fireballs and smoke as a large aircraft draws near with an exhaust of clouds of greenish smoke as the ship's belly opens to show a throat, rows of sharp teeth, and another throat opening as it roars. A woman uses a cigarette lighter and a bottle of Scotch that she stuffs newspapers into, lights it, and allows a ship/monster to come close enough to open its second throat and she tosses in the bottle bomb; the bomb explodes loudly as we hear screaming from the monster as other beings in the blurry background run on all fours out of the frame.
► A woman in a car speeds out a driveway and through a mailbox and its pole, throwing the debris into the street. A woman runs away from a man in a bunker, up metal steps to an airlock where she unlocks the first door and looks out the second window at car headlights as a woman with a burned face and hands slams her face and hands on the window, head-butts it, curses, and demands entrance (we see a large blood smear on the glass) as the man inside says the woman outside will die from fallout exposure.
► A woman whittles the end of a crutch into a point, and uses a match to light a piece of cloth and place it into an air vent to create smoke and fire that sets off the smoke alarm until a man walks in and she tries to stab him, but he stops her, giving her a sedative injection (please see the Substance Use category for more details) as she screams.
► A woman in a basement room struggles to reach her phone on the floor across the room, using an IV stand but finds that the phone has no signal; she shudders as a man opens a heavy steel door and enters and she pleads, "Don't hurt me" as he explains that she was in shock from an auto accident, that he saved her life, and the air outside is contaminated from the fallout of a chemical or nuclear attack, and then gives her crutches and locks the door as he leaves. A woman in a homemade hazard suit climbs out a skylight and looks around to see a metal shed loudly explode into large flames and as she climbs into a pickup truck, she tears the leg of her suit, panics, and wraps it with duct tape.
► A man forces a woman and another man to pull a large barrel of acid into a bathroom and he dissolves a pair of scissors in it. A woman struggles to climb into a dark air vent and up ventilation duct work to restart a generator.
► A woman hears a loud rumbling sound several times and she sees a large aircraft in profile that looks like a giant helicopter; it turns toward her to show two long tentacles with arrowhead-point ends wriggling below the aircraft and several flaps open along its sides; it rumbles and roars loudly as if with a voice. A woman hears rumbling like that of an earthquake off-screen and the walls of her apartment shake, rattling items on shelves. We see large flashes of lightning in a black sky.
► A man on a cot in a bunker storeroom has a badly scraped shoulder and his arm in a sling throughout the film; he says he hurt it trying to get into the bunker when he saw a strange bright flash of light from some sort of attack he could not name.
► We see a pickup truck with red paint smeared down a dent on one side from an auto accident. A locked skylight is etched with the word PLEH (plea for "help" to the outside world) and some blood at the bottom of the P. We hear clattering off-screen and a man on screen shouts and walks out a door; we hear a thud and later hear that another man toppled over a shelving unit with a week's worth of food on it, ruining the food.
► A man plays a board game involving guessing with another man and a woman as he stares and frowns at them threateningly and says, "I am always watching you. I see everything. I know what you are up to. I am always watching," and then continues, "I know when you are sleeping. I know when you're awake" and the woman blurts out, "Santa Claus." A man tells a woman that he drove by her on a highway, hurrying to get to his bunker when he saw a bomb explosion from an enemy attack, and that he accidentally hit her car.
► A large man pounds his fist on a table loudly and shouts at another man and a woman sitting there, making them jump. A car radio plays an announcement that the US Eastern seaboard has suffered a widespread blackout. A man takes a woman to an airlock in a bunker and shows her the yard outside the small window as we see two bloody hogs sliced to ribbons and the man says that some enemy has done this and killed all the people except those in the bunker. A woman tells a man that when she was little her older brother stopped their father from yanking on her arm too hard several times. A woman says that she saw a man in a store walking and yanking very hard on his small daughter's arm and even hitting her and that she could not help because she froze. A man says that the Martians have weapons stronger than those of the Russians and that everyone outside the bunker everywhere is dead. A man says that the enemy, whoever it is, is likely looking for any life forms still alive, in order to kill them. A man tells a woman that his daughter "Is not with us anymore" and we later hear that the woman he was referring to is not the daughter, but someone who disappeared two years ago. A woman in a bunker hears a car drive overhead several times and helicopter rotors twice and she later tells a man that she heard choking noises of someone dying up there. A woman tells a man that there is no enemy invasion and that another man drove her off the road and dragged her into the bunker where all three are now living; the first man says, "No way! I saw the attack, a flash in the sky, blood red," and then that it is like the Bible and he has never seen anything like it before. A man watches a TV that is off-screen and we hear a woman scream in a movie. On a car radio at night, a woman hears that the US Eastern seaboard has been taken back in some sort of war and that survivors are at a hospital.
► A man shows a woman the toilet in his bunker; he tells her to sit and pull a curtain, but also that he will not leave the doorway because he does not trust her and the scene ends (we do not see or hear the woman using the toilet).
LANGUAGE 5 - At least 1 F-word, 4 scatological terms, 6 mild obscenities, name-calling (crazy, idiot, circus freak, traitor, pervert, you people), exclamations (shut-up, shoot, oh my goodness), 8 religious exclamations (e.g. Oh God, I Swear to God, God, Lord; God Knows What, I Swear).
SUBSTANCE USE - A woman pulls an IV line out of her arm (please see the Violence/Gore category for more details), a man injects a woman in the arm with a sedative to make her sleep, and a man gives a woman two pills and tells her they will help relieve pain from an injury (we do not see her swallow them). A woman packs an unopened bottle of Scotch and leaves her apartment, two bottles of amber soda or beer are seen at a dinner and a man and a woman each drink a short glass of the liquid, a man and a woman drink homemade vodka and the woman coughs, and a man tells a woman that he became drunk one night so he would miss the bus to go to college the next morning. A woman lights a cigarette lighter to set off a bomb made from a bottle of Scotch (please see the Violence/Gore category for more details).
DISCUSSION TOPICS - Chemical and nuclear war, foreign attacks on America, bomb shelters, fear, danger, bullying, physical and emotional abuse, murder, survival, trust, problem solving, making decisions.
MESSAGE - Monsters sometimes look like human beings and sometimes like the unknown.
CAVEATS
Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.
We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.
Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.
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