Director: Fede Alvarez
Writers: Fede Alvarez, Rodo Sayagues
Stars: Stephen Lang, Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette
1 Hour, 28 Minutes
Buy now from Amazon: https://amzn.to/2JNsJ8k
We open on a man dragging a girl down the street by her hair. She appears to be dead. Credits Roll.
Three friends break into a house and start stealing stuff. When they’re done, they set off the alarm and run away. Rocky and Money are saving money to leave Detroit for California. Alex can’t leave because his dad lives there. Alex returns the keys to the victim’s home to his father’s desk. His father runs a security company, and Alex borrows the keys and alarm codes to rob the houses.
Money gets a tip about a house to rob that has over $300,000 hidden in it. Alex’s father runs security for the house, so he can get the key. Alex looks up the house on Google, and gets the headline “Gulf War Veteran Reaches Six Figure Settlement.” Yes, the money sounds real. “Let’s do this!” Alex texts the other two. They scope out the house and find that the owner is an old blind guy with a pit bull for a dog. The neighborhood is abandoned, so there are no neighbors. They decide to come back after dark.
There’s a complication with the locks and keys, and Rocky ends up crawling through the bathroom window and letting the others in. Money sets off a homemade gas bomb in the old man’s room; he should be very asleep now. They pull out the big tools to break into the locked basement. Alex leaves; he doesn’t want to be involved when he sees Money has brought a gun.
They end up shooting the lock, and the old man comes out asking “Who’s there?” He’s obviously not unconscious. The old man moves fast and gets the gun away from Money. Money gets his head blown off very quickly.
Rocky hides in the closet. Alex comes back inside and finds Money’s body. The old man padlocks the back door and boards up the bathroom window; they can’t get out quickly now. The old man checks his safe, which is hidden in the same closet where Rocky is. She sees him enter the code 2978.
Alex and Rocky open the safe and take the money, but they can’t get out of the house. They stand right next to the old man as he bags up Money’s body and gets ready to dispose of it. They go down the stairs into the basement, and while they’re down there, the old man finds their shoes; now he knows they are there. He checks the safe again and finds the money is gone. Now he’s angry.
Meanwhile, in the basement, they find a girl chained up in a padded cell. There’s a newspaper article that says she’s the one who killed the blind man’s daughter. They release her and head for the basement exit. They open the door and the blind man is outside waiting for them. He shoots Alex’s ear. He shoots the prisoner-girl, and she dies immediately, which gets the old man really upset. He seals up the door for good; that’s one more way they can’t get out.
The old man decides to level the playing field, so he shuts off the power. No more lights. There’s quite a bit of cat-and-mouse in the dark.
They finally find their way out of the basement, only to find that the old man has let the dog inside. The dog chases them upstairs, where they barricade themselves in a bedroom. Rocky crawls out through the heating duct, and Alex falls through a skylight into the kitchen. Neither of them make it out of the house.
The old man catches up to Alex in the laundry room, and they battle rather graphically until the old man puts garden shears through Alex’s chest.
The old man catches Rocky next, and he gets his money back. He knocks her out and sets her up as the new exhibit in his padded cell in the basement.
Meanwhile, Alex gets up. The old man actually stabbed Money’s corpse, not him. How much longer can he last?
In the basement, the old man finally speaks and explains what was going on with Cindy, the former prisoner in the basement. Things are about to get a lot more unpleasant for Rocky.
Commentary
The exteriors of the house were indeed shot in Detroit, but all the interior stuff was shot in Hungary.
I’ve been in old houses like this, and I cannot believe that a blind man could live there and not hear the intruders moving around on the squeaky wooden floors. My own house is nowhere near that old and worn down, and I can’t even walk to the bathroom silently in the middle of the night. Not even to mention all the talking that goes on between Alex and Rocky and the blind man doesn’t hear any of it. Also, they really couldn’t get out the locked doors? How about a window? Those weren’t all locked up. At one point the blind man turns off all the power in the house, yet we later see lamps on and the washing machine gets turned on by mistake.
Really though, if there’s one old man you don’t want to mess with it’s gotta be Stephen Lang. Didn’t any of these kids see Avatar?