Cube Zero

Cube Zero is a 2004 Canadian horror film directed by Ernie Barbarash, the third of the Cube series.

Synopsis:

A woman wakes up in a metal room with nothing but a sparse military/prison uniform on her back and the memories of her abduction. Soon strangers come in through one of the round people sized holes on each of the six walls, all seemingly in the same predicament as she. The name of the game is survival. They crawl from one room to another to find an exit, an answer. Each room is more than likely to be equipped with something deadly, and there's no sure way to tell. Their best method is 'booting', tossing in the heavy duty shoes they wore in the hopes of activating any boobytraps.

Boobytraps. Basically the highlight of this series is the various ingenious and often gruesome deathtraps in each room. Off the top of my head there's death by exposure to extreme base (saponification), death by fast acting flesh eating bacteria, death by microwave.... It's all pretty magnificent to be honest, all flesh-dripping and bone-melting. Definitely the best part of the film, probably the only part worth praising.

Death by steel strings cutting you to pieces

Does saponification really happen like this?

And the prize for 'winning', escaping, is to end up on top of a heat vent, life and death hinging on that age old question:

"Do you believe in God?"

Watching our heroine struggle through the tunnels are two cube technicians. They have no memories either, but they know they must do their job or risk the wrath of those 'above'. One of the technicians develop an attachment to our heroine, and decides to go in the Cube to help her. The 'above' send some men in black and a 'pimp' boss guy to rectify the situation. So begins our hero and heroine's race against time to save themselves.
Against all odds, they escape, because our hero's conveniently a proper genius.

Once outside a game of unfair chase ensues in the beautiful green foliage of native Canada. The military guys tranq our hero and leaves it unclear whether the woman escaped. When he wakes up again he's strapped to an operation table, ready to be lobotomized. Apparently he signed away his life years ago to the government and became a test subject of some huge complicated psychological study involving elaborate death chambers. Apparently everyone who's in the cube signed such a contract, and 'deserve' to be there.

Our hero screams, the screen fades, and he wakes up an idiot in the Cube with a few new people.

The end! Or is it?

Thoughts:

This film makes it seem like Canadians are all conspiracy theorists. Why the government would carry out such a pointless and expensive psychological experiment is beyond me. Maybe the rest of the 'Cube' series explain this better, but I was completely unsold on the concept. The set up of the 'main' characters were also lacking. I just couldn't care less about the woman or her daughter, or whether it was a real memory or a fake one, which was the notion they were trying to instill I'm sure.

Kinda looks like a washer

This movie was strangely less claustrophobia inducing than I expected. The rooms, or cubes, were nice and spacious, modern and clean. The most claustrophobic thing about it was the ending, in which our 'hero' gets a lobotomy and becomes trapped in the Cube again. See now its not the Cube that's imprisoning him, its his own mind! It was completely oppressive and hopeless and really hurt its rewatch values. Call me a wimp but the notion just makes uncomfortable on a basic level. Death is death. Torture is torture. Demoting someone's consciousness and identity until they can't even seek death if they wish? That's true horror.

Canada doesn't even have the death penalty. Is this series some form of repressed expression?

They'll have you believe its science fiction - it isn't. It's an excuse for gore, which I'm happy with.

Also this:

Hello, I think I'm on the wrong set.

This guy's suppose to be some supervisor/boss's lackey. He's bizarre to the point of being surreal. He's a complete caricature, so out of place he could be spliced in from the seedy alleys of some B-grade gangster flick (or a Lynch movie). I mean a diamond/mechanical eye? Really?

TL;DR:
Its like a lower budget version of SAW, less psychological but no less gimmicky. Gory enough.