The Apocalypse
The Apocalypse Box directed by writer, director, and producer James Eaves is an irritating and overstuffed film that somehow, within its mercifully brief 90 minutes running time, feels dreadfully long. The Apocalypse Box is the answer to the question what if Hellraiser was boring? Dead on Arrival, we have seen it all before, with nothing new to offer but a worn out plot and tiresome cliché-rich characters.
I won’t usually have any qualms about the lack of finesse in a horror film if it is deliberate, now here I am inclined to say that three of my favorite films are Army Of Darkness, Big Trouble In Little China and Tremors which are not exactly cinematic masterpieces in terms of subtlety, but however the problem is that The Apocalypse Box seeks to be a piece of political and social criticism, hence it feels incredibly clunky and pretentious.
The plot of The Apocalypse Box revolves around a right wing politician called Piers Stonesmith who is played by Tom Butcher Thomas, who is basically Enoch Powell/Nigel Farage with a dose of Denholm Reynholm. On the night of the general election he uses his spin doctor to help him in persuading his wife who doesn’t take kindly to him and is very much like Theresa May/Nicola Murray, Helena Corrine Wicks to three random people who were promised a great time but were actually brought there for other reasons.
Piers also introduces the box, which is ominously titled the apocalypse box. With it, he is able to indiscriminately grant the wishes of every person daring enough to touch it and hence it has the potential to bring both unimaginable power and danger forth .
The Apocalypse Box has one of the worst scripts ever, in the form of James Eaves’s writing. Neither of the characters is anything close to 3–D human characters they are just bunch of paper-thin caricatures. The story is full of TV and movie clichés such as the out of touch Brexit dad Cyrill (Russell Biles), Ray (Jake Isaacs) the sleazy journalist to the Tim (Jack Mariner Brown) who barely qualifies as a Gen Z poster boy who sounds like a generic character spouting uninspired dialogue about intergenerational differences that you would hear on an episode of Neighbors.
It is unfortunate, because there were quite a few actors that seem to not be at fault for being mediocre and these include the race and none of the main cast, it seems were out of place. However, perhaps the most baffling element of the cast is that the seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, is also there playing some newsreader in between that explains what did every character with the box.
It almost seems paradoxical that there exists a film featuring McCoy, who is inexplicably well-known as an actor, yet manages to achieve very little in this flick considering the cast appears to have been loaded with underdogs. His part can hardly go beyond what was portrayed by Burr, and that was little more than a famous figure being brought in for the Americanized Godzilla film as a face to the scenes.
McCoy’s character had some potential, but it would have required Eaves to craft the story in such a way that there was a news and/or a reality television crew among the focus group, which would have granted more of a role to McCoy’s character.
In short, Apocalypse Box is unable to completely settle on a position as to whether it is attempting to be merely an homage to the Clive barker horror or rather a sober polemic on the state of the nation. The sad thing however about this is that due to this overall disjunction of mood the film suffers many distractions, which paired with poor pacing and a bad script creates a forgettable and tedious film.
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