Film: The Lock-In
Produced by: Rich Praytor and Beverly Banks, Holy Moly Productions

This past weekend, I watched a Christian-produced found footage horror film called The Lock-In with my girlfriend and friend. The Lock-In tells the story of three friends who unlock a demon when they bring a porn magazine to their overnight church lock-in. Read those two sentences again. Did you laugh? Probably, because that is arguably the most ridiculous film concept you will read about in 2014. When UTG got the press release for The Lock-In, we all pretty unanimously freaked out about it, because we hoped it was going to be not only absolutely horrendous and heavy-handed, but also incredibly fun to watch. I’m happy to report that while The Lock-In is still probably one of the worst films I have ever watched, I still had a really great time.

Let’s get this out of the way: this is not a good movie. The Lock-In is hard to watch, extremely cringe-worthy, and looks like it was actually filmed by a bunch of Christian kids over the course of one night. At times, you can’t even tell what’s happening on screen, not because they planned it, but because they simply did not know how to shoot the scene. The acting is absolutely horrendous, and for whatever reason all the kids look like Christian-scenecore kids from the early 2000s, which I found pretty jarring for some reason, especially considering one of them was named Genesis. On top of that, the writing sounds like if your lame youth minister who tries to casually slide in messages into normal conversation, but he always comes across preachy and weird. Literally, there’s a scene where the kids are borderline crying having a conversation, and the girl basically spells out the entire message of the film, in case you didn’t understand what they were trying to say already. Side note: it’s 2014, why did you choose the demon to come out of a porn magazine? Seriously, no kid, even Christians, if they’re interested at all in looking at porn, aren’t going to look at it in a magazine, especially one that they fished out of a full-sized dumpster, presumably one someone threw out that day. I got some real weird friends, and not even they would do that. In addition, the audio mixing was super loud in some scenes, then super soft in other scenes, which made me have to run back and forth from the couch to my audio controls for the first quarter of the movie because I thought I had messed up my speakers. The “special effects” pretty much consisted of iMovie filters, which of course made me groan throughout almost all of those scenes.

All that being said, I still had a great time watching The Lock-In. I laughed so hard, borderline weezing at points, because some of it was so bad. If you’re into watching films like The Room, Troll 2, etc., this is something you definitely need to add to your roster. I couldn’t stop laughing as they needlessly shit-talk their friend purely because he’s homeschooled, which I still don’t get why that was necessary, as well as it being not very Christian. Watching the demon “reign terror” by pushing a trash can over had us all dying, my friend needing to go take a walk cause he couldn’t stop squealing from how awful the film was. Want to watch a horror movie where you understand the moral before you hit play, that has absolutely no violence, but has tons of half baked attempts to cry? This is the movie for you. Want to see crew members’ feet walk into shots and then when they realize what happened they step right back out, and it be left in the film? This movie is for you. The Lock-In is a movie that begs to be watched with friends, preferably ones that are kinda questionable and sketchy. This will be one of the worst movies of 2014, but if you’re looking for something so horrid that you hope all the kids die in the movie, this most certainly has to be your choice.

SCORE: F

Written by: Tyler Osborne

If you want to laugh at a bunch of kids running away from a porn demon, pick it up on their website here. 

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Tyler Osborne

Live in DC, grew up in PA. I specialize in writing, filming and taking pictures about punk, pop-punk, and hardcore music, and I also have a huge background in film as well. When not on the site, i'm running my own internet radio show, ToZ's Edge Radio (www.facebook.com/tozedgeradio). I also love stage diving and goldfish.

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