With a title like ‘Steel Trap’ my first thought was that I was going to have deal with some more ‘Saw’ type torture horror which I absolutely have come to despise. Yeah, it may be odd that I don’t mind seeing some unstoppable dude in a hockey mask take a machete and chop somebody in half, but I gotta draw the line somewhere and watching people suffer while their fingernails are getting systematically ripped from their fingers just ain’t my idea of a good time at the movies. We’re talking ‘Marathon Man’ without any of the clever surrounding story, Dustin Hoffman or Sir Laurence Olvier over here. You can seriously keep that garbage. Fortunately ‘Steel Trap’ is simply a title, which as far as I can tell doesn’t have gatdamn thing do with the movie, and really isn’t torture horror at all. There is a bit horror in the film, and a hell of a lot of torture in actually watching it, but at its heart it just an atypical slasher film.

It is one hell of hell of a blowout New Year’s Eve party and we are happy about one thing in that our potential victims seem to be somewhere in their thirties as opposed to being a bunch of horny college aged students, not that this will make them any smarter or any more pleasant to be around. It also makes them less prone to get naked so I guess it’s not such a good thing to have more mature victims in a slasher flick. Regardless, our potential victims tonight will be Kathy (Georgia Mackenzie) who hosts a cooking show, has a pretty bad case of the bitchies, and I’m thinking Ms. Mackenzie was with child while filming this flick. Next we have Wade (Mark Wilson) who was the entertainment for our little party and used to be a child rock star back in the day. Allow me to introduce you to Nicole (Julia Ballard) and her boyfriend Robert (Pascal Langdale). Julia works for the newspaper as an advice columnist and seems to have a very bad case of the whores and her man Robert apparently didn’t know this as he was going to use this night to propose to her, but now he’s having second thoughts, though I’m thinking by sunrise all of that will be a moot point regardless. We also have Pamela (Joanna Bobbin) who is a program director at Kathy’s television station and a major kiss ass, and to close things out we have Adam (Adam Rayner) who is a cocaine snorting womanizer and some girl he met at the party in Melanie (Annabelle Wallis) who is young woman at the wrong damn place at the wrong damn time.

Five of our victims get texted a message about a party a few floors down in this skyscraper from the party they happened to be attending, with boyfriend Robert and Wrong Place Girl Melanie accompanying their Significant Others which is going to totally suck for them. At first the party seems all good and fun with silly music and stupid nursery rhymes playing over the loud speaker, particularly since the unseen host seems to know everybody so well, but then folks start dying. Nothing ruins a party quicker than severed pigs heads and dead bodies piling up. Now all that remains, as our slightly more mature but no less stupid adults start to fall off one by one, is why has somebody marked them for death and will anybody make it out alive to survive?

Though I’m happy that ‘Steel Trap’ wasn’t torture horror, I may have benefited from some scenes of torture since it wasn’t scary horror either. The mystery is, as our victims are lead through a labyrinth of corridors and rooms, is who is doing the killing. Now we have some guy stalking the halls in a weird mask who we know is doing at least some of the killing but since we’ve seen a bunch of these movies before, we would be somewhat surprised if one of our supposed victims isn’t in on it as well. I think you’ll figure out who it is pretty quickly, though the reasons behind the madness you probably won’t see coming. And how in the hell did our perpetrator manage to rig all these elaborate traps and what not? MacGuyver like a mofo. The acting from our victims wasn’t so bad but they dialog that came out their mouths was fairly atrocious. It was bad before they realized that were being hunted by an insane killer with a knack for demonic fairy tales, but it got even worse afterwards since I’m thinking that nobody actually talks like that ever. Especially when you take into consideration that they are finding folks strung up in elevators, swinging with axes embedded in their skulls or scarfing their own still beating hearts.

The main problem with ‘Steel Trap’ is that it simply didn’t bring anything new or fresh to a tired genre that really made it worth watching. The pacing was leisurely, the gore was relatively light, the narrative was unoriginal, and the performances were run of the mill. ‘Steel Trap’ isn’t the worst horror movie out there, but its mediocrity still makes it one you’ll probably least care to see.