Movie Review: Iron Lung

A low-budget horror with limitations

I went into Iron Lung knowing very little about it, other than an older video about the game and how creepy it is. From what I saw of the game, I expected a tense, claustrophobic adventure in the sea of blood. That is not what I got.

Let’s get things started with the positive, which is that they certainly did a lot with the $3 million budget. While that is to be commended, you can also see the limitations of that budget in play quite a lot, which is, I think what took me out of it early on.

By the time we got to the 45-minute mark of the movie, I had basically checked out, keeping one eye on it while doing other things. That feeling of claustrophobia, which was so evident in The Deep by Nick Cutter, simply wasn’t there. The low-res camera shots from the exterior of the craft did not help either, as it was often tough to tell what we were actually looking at. That detail removed almost all of the fear from what might be outside looking in.

Putting together a movie that consists of one person on screen for 99% of the time is a tough sell, and tougher still when it is not an established actor. I know nothing about Markiplier and his YouTube channel, and while he was decent enough, he didn’t do enough to keep me glued to the screen through the multiple slow spots. Perhaps it was because we didn’t really glean enough about his character to give a shit about him.

Now, where things did get interesting was in the last 20 minutes, where it turned into a full-on bloodbath. I will say that there were elements of the finale which made me think of Event Horizon, albeit a shoddily made remake made for Tubi. I think if they had trimmed 30 minutes from the runtime and gotten to this finale a whole lot sooner, it might have earned a higher score from me. For most of the film, I had 2.5 stars in mind, but the final third nudged it up a half star.

3 stars out of 5