Meth makers of America, c’mon: If you’re so paranoid that you’ve rigged your drug den with, say, a door tied to trigger a shotgun, maybe make sure the head it blows off doesn’t belong to the brother of a short-fused cop?
That’s advice from Flick Attack. First one’s free, kid.
Because if you don’t, here’s what happens: Trap House, motherfucker! Police detective Grant Pierce (Jaime M. Callica, 2021’s Hypnotic) is that cop — so fierce, he has the mystery of his dead sibling solved by minute 7. It’s the doing of the gas-masked man Lethan (Bruce Crawford, Alter), who cooks up crank in an abandoned slaughterhouse.
To dissuade authorities, thieves and basic lookie-loos, Lethan and his foxy partner (Gigi Saul Guerrero, V/H/S/85) have fashioned the place into a veritable Temple of Doom! Consider such booby-trapped built-in features as:
• a glue floor
• a room full of broken glass
• swinging cinder blocks
• spiked ceilings
• bear traps in the hallway
• mousetraps in the air ducts
• jets of scalding steam
• an invisible fence
• and more!
Aiding Pierce in his penetration of Lethan’s lair are a teenage dealer named Dibs (Peter Bundic, Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), a terrifying skinhead (a bonkers Michael Eklund, 2014’s Poker Night) and a couple other tweakers who exist for the sole purpose of allowing director Nicholas Humphries (2014’s Death Do Us Part) to demonstrate the aforementioned amenities.
Let’s not pretend that anyone watches Trap House for any other reason than to see the house do some trapping. It certainly was mine. (It sure wasn’t for crackerjack background dialogue like “Oh, man, I’m high.”) Blood and gore aside, it plays like series television, but for a testosterone-laced slice of Sawsploitation, one can do much worse.
Hell, for a “Tubi original,” one can do much, much worse. Humphries keeps this one watchable and, perhaps inadvertently, closed-captioning readable; as Pierce is pursued by addicts moving en masse like cannibal zombies, “[junkies grumbling]” appears as a subtitle — my new favorite subtitle, that is. —Rod Lott