Buried (2010) Dir: Rodrigo Cortés

High concept thriller cum horror that is as tense as a 'banjo string' when Jenna Haze is on screen.
The plot: Ryan Reynolds plays Paul Conroy, a truck driver on contract in Iraq to ferry around supplies. We join Paul as he awakens, in perfect darkness, gasping, struggling in the pitchy gloom, managing to ignite a lighter, only to discover he is in a wooden coffin, apparently underground. With no clear idea of how he got there - his last memory is of his convoy being attacked by what he believed to be insurgents - and only his Zippo, a mobile phone with a dwindling battery and an ever decreasing supply of oxygen, can Paul figure a way out of his predicament?
It's a brave move, this, setting an entire, full length feature in just one location: a small box, six feet beneath terra firma. As the movie kicks in, you can't help but wonder how the director and writer are going to sustain the premise for a full hour and half, but manage it they do, which stands as testament to the quality of both.
Mention must also be made of Reynolds, a man called upon to give pretty much a solo performance for the entire run time.
Sure, he gets to interact with disembodied voices on the other end of the phone but, essentially, this is a one man show, and he pulls it off with some style.
Interestingly, in the screening I saw, I overheard one fellow viewer claim "There's no plot," which, for my part at least, was spectacularly missing the point. There was lots of plot, lots of stuff happening, but the way it was framed we, as the audience, got to see none of it as we were seeing everything from the point of view of one man.
Ambitious, incredibly fraught and with a viciousness at its heart that just about tips it into horror territory (as opposed to thriller, the area the similarly high concept, single setting Phone Booth occupies) this gets two very firm thumbs jabbed right up there from Smell the Cult HQ.

4 out of 5

Devil (2010) Dir: John Erick Dowdle

To steal a line from someone else, they missed a trick calling this movie Devil when it should have been called Hellevator.
Based on a story by M. Night Shyamalan, a man whose reputation could not have sunk any lower had he been caught fellating Gary Glitter, this is pretty much the ultimate high concept movie: Five people get stuck in a lift and one of them is Satan himself.
That's the pitch and, honestly, that is the plot.
Sure, we get the odd bit of backstory fleshed out, primarily of the lead detective, but nothing else beyond the scope of that single line synopsis occurs at all.
It's a bleedin' miracle this movie manages to reach the required length to be classified as a motion picture, given the paucity of plot, but it does and, truthfully, though it does start to flag a little towards the end, it never really gets dull.
The ending is ludicrous, and so painfully obvious from about minute fifteen that if you don't figure out who Satan is I would strongly recommend jabbing long, sharp things into your ears until blood starts to flow.
Not really scary, not half as clever as it seems to think it is - it's trying for Cube but ends up more The Blob - I have no intention of ever watching this again, but it mildly entertained for its duration.
Perhaps they should put that on the DVD cover: "Mildly entertaining."

It's a 3 out of 5.