Trap House review.
Tubi is back with another original that is worth watching. Trap House has a fun premise and doesn’t waste time or drag itself down with unnecessary side adventures.
Classic movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Trap House
Directed by Nicholas Humphries
Written by Jordan Robinson
Starring Jaime M. Callica, Peter Bundic, Michael Eklund, and Gigi Saul Guerrero
Trap House Review
Trap House lays out all its ingredients in the first six minutes. It’s an exciting start and a great way to pull in viewer investment as quickly as possible. The full movie may not hit quite as high of notes as the opening scene does…but it maintains enough of its momentum to keep you engaged. Tubi has been delivering some worthwhile originals of late. Their Terror Train remake (and immediate sequel) may not have been world-beaters but She Came from the Woods and Bury the Bride have raised the bar of late. Trap House joins the latter in offering quality entertainment for the price of a few commercial breaks.
Those first six minutes are a key part of the success of Trap House. A trap house is apparently a drug den…though this movie uses it both as a drug house and as a literal house of traps. We understand exactly what it is by the end of those six minutes. A cook in a gas mask does his work deep inside of the trap house…behind each door or inside of any item may lie a deadly trap. The house itself is temporary…moving to a new location before detectives can track down the operation. By the time the opening scene has ended, however, one detective will take a more desperate approach to his search.
Detective Grant Pierce (Jaime M. Callica) has been on the trail of the cook…but is too late to save his brother from running into a trap. His head is blown apart when he opens the wrong door attempting to evade a police raid. Pierce’s brother was a junkie who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now Pierce will do anything to put an end to the cook and his operation once and for all. We get all this information in that opening. A man looking for revenge…a gas mask wearing monster protected by a Kevin McCallister devotion to home protection. When the movie begins in earnest…you find yourself fully on board.
Trap House is more than just a simple revenge story, however. A second plotline is given equal footing and inevitably entwined with Pierce’s. Fibs (Peter Bundic) is a high school student who deals drugs out of necessity. His home life is terrible and he’s close to being expelled for missing school. Fibs is a good kid who finds himself in a different kind of trap. Things get even worse for him when an undercover Pierce threatens to bust him unless he aides in discovering the new location of the cook.
Pierce was immediately taken off the case when his brother became involved. It doesn’t take long for Pierce to find himself suspended on top of it. Not that it matters much. He decided he would work outside the law the moment he found his brother’s body on that Trap House floor. Fibs brings Pierce into the fold and the two are forced into a heist of the Trap House by the unhinged Cormac (Michael Eklund).
What follows is predictable…but that doesn’t mean it lacks in entertainment. Fibs and Pierce are interesting characters to follow. Bundic and Callica are believable in the roles. Their performances make you care about the characters and worry about their fates. The always reliable Eklund steals his scenes as Cormac…who you easily root to have the opposite desired fate from Pierce and Fibs. There are a couple of other characters involved in the heist…but they may as well be wearing the clichéd red shirts on this mission.
The downside of Trap House is a budget that can’t deliver the craziness you would want from people walking around a building full of deadly booby traps. It does what it can. What makes it work is, as mentioned, the characters you care about. You want Pierce to find the cook. You want Fibs to find a way out. Cormac needs to go. These things trump the limitations at every deadly turn.
There’s also a baby subplot that feels completely tacked on and awkward. It’s a rare misstep of a lean screenplay that fittingly catches itself in a trap of its own. Overall, however, Trap House is a good time that gets a lot of its characters and the situations they find themselves in. There’s sequel potential here…with a new direction teased before the credits roll on a satisfying Tubi original.
Scare Value
Trap House is the definition of an easy watch. It sets up the premise in the first scene and plays with it for the rest of the movie. The light on frills approach works perfectly to keep the pace moving…but does limit the thrills of seeing the traps unleashed. Still, for an original movie you can stream for free…this is a good one.
3/5
Trap House Link
Streaming on Tubi
