Crush the Skull (2015) (USA)

aka NO EXIT

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

A couple thieves target the wrong house and their score ends up being the lair of a very dangerous serial killer. The kind of monster that holds his prey in a basement dungeon and has no qualms about slaughtering a mother in front of her daughter. That kinda guy. So, the two likable thieves Ollie and Blair are looking at the final score. Thirty years old and ready to ride off into the sunset, leaving the life of crime behind. Their initial score goes wrong when the cheating wife comes home with her booty call and then her cuckold husband comes home too. It’s chaotic and pretty damn hilarious… until it ends with a double homicide and a failed suicide. Ollie gets pinched and the two are now in debt to a dangerous man after he pulls some strings to get Ollie out of the clink. This forces Blair to join up with her brother Connor and his lovable dimwit partner Riley to rob a supposedly empty summer home. Connor refuses to work alongside Ollie after a bad experience but he manages to get himself invited along for the score. Blair and Riley go looking for Connor after he disappears searching for a way in and Ollie follows them when their communication devices stop working. They soon discover that the windows are reinforced, there’s no way to communicate with the outside, the walls are concrete, all the exits are locked from the outside and every lock appears to be unpickable. Concerning indeed, but the basement has a TV hanging from the ceiling and there’s a collection of DVDs featuring home footage of people getting murdered in that very basement. Ollie takes control much to the chagrin of Connor but survival becomes key and the quartet put the bullshit to the side to find an exit or at least find the jamming device. Making everything worse, the owner is in the house and he’s more than happy to deal with this new batch of prey who have wandered into his den. They make their way to the underground maze on the property and come across signs of the monster’s work and one of his prisoners. Things slide further and further out of control and people start dropping. A wonderfully hilarious and dark script from Viet Nguyen and Chris Dinh (who is excellent as Ollie) has the benefit of being performed by a solid core of actors in the lead roles. It’s amazing to me that for all the love Don’t Breathe receives, the films that it obviously “borrowed” from (this, The Collector and Livid) are superior in every way. A shocking lack of splat may take you out of things if that’s why ya come to a movie but if you have no issue with the absence of graphic violence, you’ll be in for a real sleeper.