Tunnels (1987)

Tunnels (1987) starts out with the promise that it could be a monster movie.  A giant rat-in-the-sewers movie, to be precise.  But audience expectations are quickly whittled away at, with hints of monstrous rats, giant or otherwise, being reduced to suggestions of 'rat people' down in those city sewers, before it finally settles down to be crime thriller involving unscrupulous millionaire property developers, secret prisons and human trafficking.  Now, to be fair, there is actually one 'rat person', in the singular, present in the sewers, but he's a red herring, a weaselly looking homeless guy who lives down there and who turns out to be benign.  But the main plot unfolds as a would be thriller, with two investigative journalists following up the mystery of toilets blocked with dead rats at their offices (clearly a slow news day) accompanying an exterminator into the tunnels beneath the building and encountering various strange characters.  Despite being hampered by their editor, they eventually tie in strange happenings in the sewers with the disappearance of several homeless people from an area of the city which is the site of a proposed new development.  It eventually transpires that a local property developer is using a couple of goons to kidnap the homeless population, so as to clear the area, temporarily locking up in an underground prison, before having them shipped off overseas as slave labour by a scuzzy sea captain.  Inevitably, the two reporters end up as captives but, aided by the developer's brother, a crazy old homeless coot and the 'rat man', foil the developer's plans in a showdown on the captain's ship.  The plot does manage to spring a major plot twist toward the end, (although it was pretty well telegraphed).

The thing is that there is a half decent and quite intriguing story lurking in there, but it's execution in Tunnels leaves much to be desired.  For one thing, Mark Byers' direction has a far too languid pace, with absolutely no sense of urgency about any of the action - we never feel that the two reporters are ever really imperilled, regardless of their predicament.  The plot doesn't develop at all fluidly, with far too many distractions involving the internal politics of the newspaper, personal rivalries between the two main characters, romantic asides and the like.  Most damagingly, the film's tone is incredibly uneven, never seemingly able to decide whether it wants to be an actual thriller or a light comedy, eventually veering to the latter.  The whole thing has the distinct look and feel of a direct-to-video production: the obvious cheapness of sets, costume and props, the complete blandness of the overall production design, lighting and sound quality and flat direction which fails to summon any real atmosphere, let alone tension.  Where the film does score, though, is in being able to muster a decent enough cast of lead actors, including Catherine Bach, John Saxon, Nicholas Guest and Charlene Dallas.  OK, they aren't exactly the A-list, but they are definitely above average for this kind of production and all put in more than half way decent performances.  Bach and Dallas as the two reporters, in particular, make for engaging and sympathetic leads, both proving that, even in a low budget B-movie, women can more than hold their own in a traditionally male milieu.  Saxon, for once not playing a crazed would be galactic dictator, hard-assed cop or mad scientist, is suitably smarmy and duplicitous as their editor.  There's also decent comic support from Vic Tayback as the exterminator.  Daniel Yost's (best known for scripting Drugstore Cowboy a couple of years later) screenplay, even if its interesting central ideas never seem fully developed, does provide the main cast with some half decent dialogue.  Tunnels is pretty typical of direct-to-video fare from the eighties - quite enjoyable while it is on, but completely unmemorable and utterly disposable as entertainment.