Just rented the minor horror film or supernatural thriller The Cold Room (aka Prisoner) & got my $2 worth out of it, if only just. It's about a "hidden room" in an old hotel in East Berlin that is a sort of time travel portal to Nazi Germany -- & about a young woman (Amanda Pays) of today possessed by the ghost of a woman who had assisted a Jew (Warren Clarke) hidden in that room in the 1930s.
The possession part of the story is not badly handled -- the blending of past & present personality is sometimes very smoothly done. But her several visions of 1930s Nazi Berlin, & her one journey out the other side of the hidden room so that she is actually walking through 1930s Berlin -- these scenes are so utterly unconvincing they're almost like a bad, minimalist play that evoke nothing of the past, let alone of nazism.
The possessed girl getting raped by the father of the girl in the past was the only horrifying on-screen event. A story supposedly about the horrors of nazism needed something nazi-related to convey that past, rather than a scene of incestuous rape.
Had Rod Serling paired it down to half an hour & inserted some better scenes, it might've been a so-so episode of The Twilight Zone. But as a feature film, even one that was made for cable, it is awfully dull, though it tried not to be tacky & the actors tried not to be ridiculous.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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