Film Review – Swallowed

15 years ago, Carter Smith directed “The Ruins.” It was a particularly nasty chiller, and in all the right ways, promising big things from the helmer and his love of genre entertainment. Smith’s career path didn’t take him to expected places, but he returns to horror events with “Swallowed,” a small-scale terror experience involving drug mules, mysterious bowel activity, and a strange imprisonment. Also handling screenplay duties, Smith keeps things manageable with the effort, which is basically contained to a few rooms and features only a handful of characters, looking to inspire suspense in more intimate ways. He gets halfway there in the picture, which starts out strong, promising ghoulish developments to come. Such extremity doesn’t arrive in “Swallowed,” but the build-up to agony is compelling enough to pass, with Smith skilled at launching a bizarre endeavor, but less confident when it comes to ending it. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com