Film: No One Lives
Starring: Luke Evans
Directed by: Ryûhei Kitamura

It is no well kept secret that horror has long been a viable cash cow for studios hoping to make a quick buck. People love scary movies for reasons that allude many, and as long as the ad campaign is slick and the production cost low enough you can almost guarantee some level of return on your investment. Unfortunately, the knowledge of this information has resulted in many people attempting to cash in without having any real passion for the genre. The results of those efforts, while sometimes admirable for various individual qualities, lack the sense of inherent fun that great horror needs to succeed. The focus for these films is not on entertaining, but on pushing limits and/or punishing the viewer with whatever grotesque ideas possible, and try as they might that simply is not enough to create a good, lasting impression on horror fans.

No One Lives is the latest entry from the world of WWE films. Most film reviews I write dig deep into the story of a feature and tries to find where, if at all, it went wrong. No One Lives fails so colossally hard from the opening moments that to dignify it with a few hundred words would be a slight against all the decent horror features we cannot find the time to cover. In short, viewers follow a couple with a dark secret who run into a gang of bad guys who, in the process of robbing the couple, discover their secret and quickly begin to face the consequences of their actions. Bad guys versus worse guys (and gals), if you will.

At first glance, No One Lives offers everything one might hope to find in a body count driven flick: A crazed killer, bad people you want to see gone, and a flair for theatrical violence that translates far better than any line of dialogue (throughout the film). However, the film has one major flaw, and no matter how violent or twisted the story attempts to be it is always held back by this one thing: Not a single character is likable. Their actions might be entertaining, in bursts, but not a face on the screen is relatable or (for the most part) enjoyable in the slightest. It’s a movie about bad people doing bad things to other bad people they perceive to be worse than them, and the actions of that second group of baddies to defend themselves. Again, it seems enticing, but as the film’s 80-ish minute runtime begins to drag before the first act closes you realize just how important that connection to character truly is. If you don’t care about them, why care if they die? If you don’t care if they die, why care about the film at all?

As the body count rises and our cast of hardened criminals begin to act more like scared teenagers running from a masked maniac at camp, it becomes clear No One Lives has no point or message for viewers to take away. You want the main character to live, I guess, but his motivations for doing so are relatively nonexistent. The film tries to cover this by including an awkward sequence in which our protagonist proclaims himself a psychopath, but it’s a scene that falls short of driving home the sense of madness the creators were going for. Viewers get that he’s a psycho, that is made abundantly clear by his over-the-top approach to murder, but what we never truly grasp is why. In some cases this is not necessary because uncovering the truth is part of the fun, but No One Lives never hints at being anything more than a surface-level story concocted to showcase cheap special effects and grisly death scenes. That may be enough to entice some, but ultimately the whole production leaves you feeling underwhelmed and, if we’re being completely honest, a bit pissed for having wasted your time on something that lacks any sign of creativity or passion. It’s happy being forgettable, and I’ll be happy to forget it.

Score: D

Review written by: James Shotwell

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James Shotwell

James Shotwell is the founder of Under The Gun Review. He loves writing about music and movies almost as much as he loves his two fat cats. He's also the co-founder of Antique Records and the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. You should probably follow him on Twitter.

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