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ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - September 11th

"CUBE" released in 1998

Six strangers awaken to find themselves trapped in a huge industrialized labyrith of cube-shaped rooms, with no memory of how they got there. As they try to find a way out they soon discover some of the rooms contain lethal traps. In order to survive, the group must use each others strengths to escape in Vincenzo Natali debut sci-fi thriller, Cube!

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A man named Alderson (Julian Richings) awakens in a cube-shaped room with a hatch in each wall, the ceiling and the floor, each of which leads to other cube-shaped rooms, identical except for their color. When Alderson walks into a orange colored room, he triggers a trap and is killed. Later,  five more people – Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint), Worth (David Hewlett ), Holloway (Nicky Guadagni), Rennes (Wayne Robson), and Leaven (Nicole de Boer) – meet. None of them knows where they are or how they got there, but Quentin informs the others that some rooms contain traps, which he learned by injured by one earlier. One the group, Rennes - otherwise known as prison escape artist, the Wren - is the first to be killed by entering a room he thought was safe, but triggered a trap that covered him in acid. The group realise that each room must have different types of detection (like heat sensors as well as motion detection) and despair that there is no way for them too know which room is indeed safe. Quentin believes each person has a reason for being there - Leaven is a mathematics student and Holloway is a physician and conspiracy theorist, while the surly Worth declines to talk about himself. Discovering each door has a numbered mark on it, Leaven hypothesizes that any room marked with a prime number is a trap. This new system works for a while and the group later find a mentally challenged man named Kazan (Andrew Miller), whom Holloway insists they bring along. Tempers start to fray when Quentin is nearly killed in a room Leaven deemed safe, which sparks an argument where Worth accidentally reveals that he has knowledge of the Cube. Worth admits that he designed the Cube's outer shell for a shadowy bureaucracy and guesses that its original purpose has been forgotten; they have been imprisoned within simply to put it to use. Worth's knowledge of the outer shell's size allows Leaven to determine that each side of the Cube is 26 rooms across and that there are 17,576 rooms in total with the numbers acting as Cartesian coordinates of the rooms. With the situation now desperate, and Quentin becoming more violent and unhinged, the remaining survivors now must struggle to get to the edge of the Cube and find a way to escape before they start turning on each other!

Rennes: No more talking. No more guessing. Don't even think about nothing that's not right in front of you. That's the real challenge. You've gotta save yourselves from yourselves. 

Top and Above:   Five strangers; Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint), Worth (David Hewlett ), Holloway (Nicky Guadagni), Rennes (Wayne Robson), and Leaven (Nicole de Boer) wake to find themselves trapped in the Cube! 

Inspired by an episode of the original The Twilight Zone television series, "Five Characters in Search of an Exit", Vincenzo Natali wrote the screenplay for Cube, later developing and filming a short film Elevated (a horror thriller filmed entirely in a elevator set) to give investors an idea of how Cube would hypothetically look and come across. Ultimately though, Cube would be the first film to be financed by the Canadian Film Centre's First Feature Project. Interestingly, each of the characters in the screenplay were originally supposed to be chartered accountants (in order to better identify the prime number coordinates) and each were named after a real-life prison - Quentin (San Quentin, California), Holloway (England), Kazan (Russia), Rennes (France), Alderson (Alderson, West Virginia), Leaven and Worth (Leavenworth, Kansas). The backstory of the characters was subsequently changed to reflect the prisons of which each was named; Kazan (the mentally challenged character), in Russia is a disorganized prison. Rennes (the "mentor") was a jail that pioneered many of today's prison policies. Quentin (the detective) is known for its brutality. Holloway is a women's prison, and Alderson is a prison where isolation is a common punishment. Leavenworth runs to a rigid set of rules (Leaven's mathematics), and the new prison is corporately owned and built (Worth, hired as an architect).

Shot on a Toronto sound stage over a 20-day schedule, only one full cube set was built (with handles on all the hatches being industrial die holders used for cutting threads on rods and available in any hardware shop), though made to look like many different cubes through the use of different-colored panels and another partial cube was made for shots requiring the point of view of standing in one room looking into another. Natali originally wanted to shoot the movie in chronological order, but had to disregard this idea because the changing of the cube's gel panels was too time consuming. And so all shots taking place in rooms of a specific color were shot one at a time. The red gels were the first to be installed, meaning all scenes in red rooms were shot first. As it happens, red rooms contain the most dialog-heavy scenes in the film, including Worth's big "there is no conspiracy" speech to Holloway. The film had a modest budget and a tight schedule, and David Hewlett recalled being very apprehensive at shooting scenes that contained pages of pure dialog on his part very early in the shoot. He also felt that Worth's line "Well I feel better" after his rant to Holloway rang immensely true on a personal level, as the remainder of the shoot was much less dependent on his memorization.

Quentin: Why put people in it?
Worth: Because it's here. You have to use it, or you admit it's pointless.
Quentin: But it, it "is" pointless.
Worth: Quentin... that's my point.

Top:   Another prisoner, Alderson (Julian Richings) is killed by one of the Cube's traps!;

Above:   The group discover the coordinates of the doorways that may save their lives

Premiering at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival on September 9th, Cube won the award for Best Canadian First Feature Film, and would spend the next year playing the film festival circuit - including the Athens Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival of Fantasy Film (where it won the  Silver Raven), and Edinburgh International Film Festival - before getting a limited release in the US on September 11th, 1998. Cube polarized critics, with many highly positive reviews against negative ones. PopMatters and WorldsGreatestCritic.com journalist J.C. Maçek III wrote "Canadian Indie Cube is not usually found on a list of great Sci-Fi/ Horror classics. That's a shame, because this film has proven to be a remarkably artistic and surprising little gem with some good acting and real thrills. I wasn't sure what to expect, however, from the first moment to the last, I couldn't look away!" Bloody Disgusting gave the movie a positive review, writing, "Shoddy acting and a semi-weak script can't hold this movie back. It's simply too good a premise and too well-directed to let minor hindrances derail its creepy premise." Nick Schager, a reviewer for Slant Magazine, added, "The struggle to discern the cube's purpose increasingly takes on prominence in the frazzled crew's search for answers, but Natali's film is infinitely more competent at creating a clever situation then [i.e., than] positing any sort of semi-logical explanation."

Cube developed a cult following due moderate commercial success and to its surreal, Kafkaesque setting when released on DVD however, inspiring two more films in the series; Cube 2: Hypercube in 2002 (a sequel) and Cube Zero in 2004 (a prequel, which perhaps explains the backstory of Kazan). In March 2011, it was rumored that Lionsgate Films was considering an additional film in the series, tentatively titled Cube 3D to rebbot the series, and was confirmed by , The Hollywood Reporter in April 2015 when Lionsgate further announced plans to remake the original film under the title Cubed, with Saman Kesh as director.

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:   62%

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