Even before the credits at the beginning began, I was discounting this as nonsense. "Who commissioned this? Which sap paid for it? Who the hell did the bloody casting? In March 2011 this got its first airing at the Boston Underground Film Festival (where it should have stayed, frankly) followed by the Sci-Fi Festival in London the following month and then seemingly every other two-bit festival known to man. No surprise, however, that it missed all of the big ones. Even by March 2012, a whole year later, it had only managed a limited US release.
This is a regular story for some independent movies that make it out of the wilderness and into the mainstream to be recognised as a massive success in film-making. Others on this same journey rightly belong in the shadows where they are highly unlikely to be witnessed by man nor beast. The Corridor is one such example of the latter.
This is the story of a group of friends who go out into the snowy wilderness (there may have been a reason and I just missed it, it might have something to do with ashes and a dead mother) and find the eponymous corridor and then all hell breaks loose. How many times have we seen this before? Do we really need to see another, even shabbier version?
Having said that, the acting itself is, at times, not half bad. The script is dire and the direction is awful, if we're honest, and the compulsion to root for the characters is minimal. The cast try their best and they should be applauded for their efforts, but they really do not have much to go on. Mucking about in the spooky woods is all well and good, but it needs to compel the viewer, to grab them by the larynx and give them a bloody good shake. The mood throughout is dull as dishwater, failing to inspire. It bores those watching. There is something to be said for a slow burn and reveal, but this is just too slow. It was a big gamble to try and throw these no-faces into this situation, dress them up with some sort of form and backstory and then hurl them into mortal peril. Most films of this type just go straight for money shot and dispense with the niceties of character histories.
And there is a reason for this. Nobody cares about those that we do not need to dwell on. It's like reading thirty pages in the middle of a novel about a character you have only just met, to find that he/she is killed off at the end of the chapter and has no real relevance to the story by the end. And this is The Corridor. Too much time is spent fleshing out those that don't really matter. Kudos for the attempt, but it just doesn't work. The story was just so terribly conceived that if it transpired that this corridor was in fact real, I would still have difficulty imagining myself summoning enough gusto to even bother going to have a look at the phenomena.