Ben Parker's THE CHAMBER: Confined-space melodrama opens in theaters and digitally

The first alert that something may be amiss about THE CHAMBER -- a somewhat new (made in 2016) confined-space movie from writer/director Ben Parker -- is the fact that the "scientists," or maybe "military" folk who come aboard the mini-submarine (that rather thoroughly confines everyone's space) refuse to tell the sub's captain, who appears to be the movie's hero, why they are there or what they are searching for. This is suspect to and for the captain but also to and for the very believability of the movie's plot.

You will either accept this "fact" or not, but to keep watching, you'll need to pretty completely suspend what they used to call your "disbelief." (Though, in the age of Trump, could there possibly be much disbelief left to suspend?) Mr. Parker, shown at right, does an adequate job in the directorial department but a quite below-average one as a writer. On the plus side is his ability to keep us guessing as to who is good and who isn't and why. But by the time we find out, his plot, motivations and all else seems so jumbled as to make his would-be confined-space thriller/melodrama not so much about "who will survive?" as it is about "who cares?".

One reason I decided to give this movie a spin is its star: Johannes Kuhnke (above), who was so fine as the lead in that near-avalanche/family film Force Majeure. He is certainly OK here, but the role is limited to mostly silly plot machinations involving nuclear naughtiness and, yes, North Korea and the U.S., with Charlotte Salt (below), playing the head of the antagonist group. (Given its 2016 provenance, the film is timely, at least.)

As The Chamber takes place under the sea, you needn't place any bets on whether or not the water will soon rise around its protagonists/antagonists. But as the characters keep doing dumb things and are allowed to continue this for far too long, your patience may run out before the movie does.

Granted the situation here is grim, but did Mr. Parker need to make his characters so alternately dumb and crazy? The craziest is played (and well enough, certainly) by James McArdle, below, and the sweetest by Elliot Levey, above. But the nonsense piles up in the last half-hour to the point that it grows so silly that it very nearly becomes fun. Almost. Dumb and tiresome finally win out.

Really, now: You increase your passenger list by two people, yet you don't bother to include two more survival suits? The ending is such that I asked myself why in hell I bothered to sit through all this. Oh, right: It was Mr. Kuhnke's fault.

From Cinedigm and running too long, even at only 90 minutes, The Chamber opens tomorrow, Friday, February 23, in a few theaters and on digital streaming. Your move....

Steven C. Miller graduates to the semi-big-time via imperiled-youth thriller, SUBMERGED

Each Thanksgiving TrustMovies tries to acknowledge a deserved "turkey" among the past year's films. Because nothing in particular came to mind this year, and because he had just watched a new-and-not-very-good film opening tomorrow in New York City, I'm afraid it's this one that gets my Turkey Award for 2015. I realize that there were some worse movies this year, but after sitting through 99 long and increasing silly minutes, "turkey" seems a perfectly acceptable description for SUBMERGED. It's a bit of a sad one, too. As one of those critics who enjoyed an earlier film -- a little scare movie called Under the Bed -- by this director, Steven C. Miller (shown below), I was eager to see what he might do with a bigger budget and some better-known and usually quite dependable actors (Tim Daly and Mario Van Peebles, to be specific).

Daly and Van Peebles are not the stars, but they are the most professional in the bunch; the remaining cast members seem practically interchangeable, including the movie's would-be star, Jonathan Bennett (below). The plot has to do with a nicely designed limo that in the opening scenes careens off the road and into the bottom of a body of water, trapping the driver (Bennett) and his "guests." The latter are made up of a couple of post-high-school girls and their would-be boyfriends/drug dealers. While underwater and figuring out how they might escape or be rescued, our "hero" keeps flashing back to better, out-of-water days, and we slowly learn particulars regarding who everyone is and how they got to the bottom of the barrel -- whoops -- the canal. Turns out it was a long journey, filled with sibling problems, sexual attraction and rebuffing, and a local businessman (Daly) who is having to lay off a lot of his current employees.

The movie, in fact, is about way too much. By the finale, full of action that is not very well or believably executed, you'll realize that the film's screenwriter Scott Milam has read (or at least heard about) the famous Matt Taibbi piece for Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs as the vampire squid. This is because the movie suddenly turns into a treatise on the evils of corporations, money and especially downsizing.

Prior to this we spend way too much time with characters (above), about whom we grow to care less and less, when it ought to work exactly the opposite. But these clunkers scream and fight and act irredeemably stupid for far too long. On the plus side, Miller makes the fear and dread of imminent drowning pretty palpable, but then forgets that the water level in the buried car needs to keep rising (at one point along the way, it appears to have gone down a lot for no good reason). As contained-space movies go, this one -- by opening up and out every few minutes so that we can learn more of the back story -- loses traction, suspense and much else. And one scene in particular telegraphs the villain all too easily, too early and too obviously.

Otherwise, I guess, Submerged is a barely adequate scare-movie/thriller, if you're not too picky. It hits theaters in a very limited release tomorrow, Friday, November 27 (in New York City, it plays at the IFC Center, in Los Angeles at the Arena Cinema), while simultaneously appearing On-Demand.