The first thing I noticed upon picking up Steel Trap was the box copy's insistence to compare this movie to Saw. This is something I can't outright say is an unwarranted observation as this does, at times, feel like a low-budget riff on the surprise 2004 hit. But when the dust settles, this is merely a bland slasher movie variation that just so happens to be littered with various traps/torture devices. But, unlike the insanely popular annual series from Lionsgate, director/co-writer Luis Camara goes pretty light on the deaths and gore scenes (and shoots almost all of them in close-up), leaving us to ho-hum our way through a movie that contains weak dialogue (for example: "I've f**ked enough skanks for a lifetime", "Well, I haven't") and overwrought, and generally poor, performances.

It's a New Year's Eve party in an abandoned apartment building and the set-up has your typical batch of twenty-something's attending with a select few getting exclusive text message invitations to a private party on a lower level. When they get down there, they're witness to a scene directly from a children's Birthday party, the only difference being that each of them have been given a title, such as "Pig", "Loser", "Heartless", and they've been left various puzzles in rhyme (the first involves a pig head wearing a crown) with the lure of a treasure hunt keeping them involved in the game.

Little do they know that not only are their various traps hidden throughout the area (including an elevator with nasty hidden spikes and a deadly floor trap) but they are also being stalked by a masked figure sporting a hook who has revenge in mind of each and every one of them. Why? Well, you'll just have to stick around until the movie trots out the twist finale promised on the back of the DVD box - even if it's so completely obvious that you'll be more prone to let loose a groan rather than a "huh, I didn't see that coming!"

I give Camara and his co-writer Gabrielle Galanter credit for coming up with an intriguing basic idea but they just don't seem to know where they want to go with it filling the movie with unlikeable characters (which, I suppose, may have been the point) and not giving us enough of the red stuff to keep us interested. There were a few moments that pleased me, those being mostly the devices I mentioned above, but most of the time I was wondering why certain characters just seem to disappear from the movie for extended periods before appearing later, seemingly out of nowhere. The problem might be that they were trying to have too many different victims on hand and just didn't know what to do with them all.

And, going back to the mentions of Saw, it was really too bad that the whole mechanic of singling out characters with a trait that befits them, and paints them in a bad light, couldn't have been used much better than it is. Rather than have our killer "judge" them, like Jigsaw does in the Saw movies, instead our killer just uses it as a way to dispatch people. We never get any real idea, until that lame twist anyway, as to why these people have been picked and why our murderer thinks this way about them - it's used mostly as a gimmick and nothing more.

In the end, Steel Trap just made me question the decision making process of Dimension Extreme in regards to what they'll release. On the one hand, you have gruelling, absolutely "extreme" stuff like Inside and Broken, while on the other you get generally junky low-budget stuff like Triloquist, Automaton Transfusion and this. It's great they want to bring some lesser-known genre films to us but, perhaps, they should be a little pickier in the future. Just an idea. (Chris Hartley, 9/29/08)

Directed By: Luis Camara.
Written By: Gabrielle Galanter, Luis Camara.

Starring: Georgia Mackenzie, Mark Wilson, Pascal Langdale, Julia Ballard.

Picture Ratio: 1.78:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: While the transfer does look a little soft at times, the dark palette of the movie is represented fine and this is a completely acceptable looking disc.

Extras: There's more added material here than I would've expected as we get a trailer, still gallery, forty-minute "making of" featurette that's actually quite watchable, and a commentary track by Camara that didn't really offer up enough insight to keep me interested.