User Reviews

247°F is as straightforward a horror movie as you'll ever see. It's uninventive and feels like a giant missed opportunity. In fact, as the movie wears on (and on) one starts to believe that there's Something behind our protagonists' troubles - but alas, if there is, it's trivial.

Most of the movie is set in a homemade sauna. Jenna, her friend Renee, Renee's boyfriend Michael, and Michael's friend Ian have zipped over to a remote island to stay in Ian's uncle's cabin for the weekend. Concurrently, it is the weekend of the May Day celebrations, apparently a big deal in the nearby towns, and Wade the uncle is involved with the setup of the festivities.

We learn a few things about our main characters right away. Jenna, meant to be the protagonist, is anxious, shy, withdrawn; flashbacks show us (in the first scenes) that her fiancé' was killed in an auto accident (with Jenna beside him), and she hasn't yet fully recovered. Friend Renee is outgoing, outspoken, caring about her pal and wanting to get her out of her self-imposed shell. Michael is the typical Type A frat boy - controlling, fun loving even at the expense of others. Ian, by contrast, is sedate, passionate, thoughtful, and well spoken; weird, because he looks like the lost Winklevoss twin.

The plan is for the foursome to go to this May Day pre-party, so while ol' Uncle Wade goes to set up, they head into his sauna. Then it gets too hot, so they jump in the lake. Then it's too cold, so back to the sauna. This goes on for a while. The entire time, Michael's drinking everything in sight, so you can see where this is headed. They go back to the sauna, he leaves to use the bathroom, and somehow the door gets stuck with the other three inside.

The point is to see how each will react to the extreme (and rising) heat, making it less a horror film and more of a psychological freak- out. Someone's going to crack - no surprise or spoiler that it's Renee, who's painted from the get-go as more selfish than most. Ian is determined to get them all out of there - he's played pretty well by Travis Van Winkle - and Jenna just tries to get by. They all assume Michael locked them in as a prank, but after a while the story switches to his passing out and just leaving them in there.

The movie could have gone in several directions. I kept expecting a twist; none came. This would have made for a predictable film, but since I naively kept thinking there was more to the story than met the eye, I didn't allow myself to become jaded.

The acting is acceptable. In addition to Van Winkle, we have the redoubtable Scout Taylor-Compton (Halloween) as the high-strung Jenna turning in a wonderful performance. But they have little to work with. People do behave as you'd expect, only in the case of some (Renee, Michael), it's more of a case of melodrama than acting. Tears are shed, as is some blood.

Because the movie lacks so much in substance and creativity, it's not an easily recommendable film. You have to be prepared for a lot of nothing much happening. After all, there's only so much you can do in a sauna without getting into deep psychological trauma, and the movie - although it had the opportunity - barely scratched the surface of everyone's problems. We know Jenna has issues and why, but we're unclear on how she deals with it. Would have been nice to see better character development - what does she fear now? Same for Renee; even her love for Jenna seems self serving. They've been friends forever, and Renee has an extroverted, love-life personality. Does she have demons? And does Ian do anything other than say just the right thing and be just the nicest guy ever?

Who knows? Stories like this have been done to death in movies - trapped in an elevator, trapped in a mine shaft, trapped on a boat, and so on. They succeed because the plot involves you with the characters. Do we really care about the state of the relationship between Renee and Jenna? Not really, because the movie gives us no reason to do so. We like Jenna, we don't like Renee too much, and we're quite ambivalent over their long-time friendship.

Is that out of the 4 main characters, the only likable and semi intelligent one dies. We're left with the drunken, horny buffoon who is totally responsible for the entire situation, one shrieking, whiny harpy and one girl with absolutely no charisma (likable guy announces to his idiot friend that he "really likes her". Why??? She has the personality of a wet dishrag.) Seriously, i only suffered through the entire thing hoping for a grisly demise to the 2 girls. Especially renee! Shes the worst and i wanted desperately for her to end up cooked like a sausage. Anyway, hated this flick. Could have been much better with more character development and less padding. I know the actors are merely acting and are probably all very nice people but i honestly wanted to punch them into next week.

If you thought this film would be good for a laugh, you're mistaken. It's really bad, but it doesn't cross that threshold like Birdemic.

A lot of the stuff is professionally done. The acting is mixed, some good actors, some bad, but the bad is not enough to ruin the picture. The sound is fairly clear, the lighting is fine, there are no technical gaffes.

The dialogue has a strange feeling like it was written by someone who isn't a native speaker. The grammar is correct, but the usage is off. This is not saying that non- native English speakers can't write English dialogues, but natural sounding dialogues are no easy feat that even Hollywood hires dialogue specialists. There is another layer of strangeness in the dialogue in that it feels like it is influenced by TV and films rather than regular speech. It's not enough to be a deal-breaker, but it was noticeable enough for me.

No biggie, it was fine.

Which leaves us with the plot. It is so contrived to the point of being unbelievable.

Here comes the spoilers:

Four youths in a sauna. The drunk one leaves and drops some stuff outside the door. He didn't know where to put a portable staircase, so he decides to put it as a doorstopper for the sauna door. He then leaves and goes into a drug-induced deep sleep. Now the door is not completely jammed, so one of the 3 left in the sauna open the door a little and close it, for no reason (supposedly to allow one of the girls to leave to talk to her drunk boyfriend) - this action drops the stairs a little more. Then the girl, who insists that she doesn't want to leave, goes to the door, opens it and shakes it a little so that the stairs slide a little more and jam the door completely. Yes, she went to the door, opened it while saying that she doesn't want to go out.

There are too many ridiculous improbabilities that we have to accept and it goes beyond what is acceptable. The drunk wakes up and goes outside the sauna, but that's exactly when the uncle decides to launch fireworks.

So the movie is how they panic in the sauna and turn on each other. Unlike other films, there's no "let's not turn on each other" speech. A girl skips all that and smashes her friend with a rock to the head. What? Why?

There are random subplots that don't add anything to the story. The main girl takes prescription drugs for mental illness. That's a thread that goes nowhere.

They try all kinds of escape plans, firstly shaking the door, running shoulder barges, breaking the window's glass, shorting the fuse, screaming, etc. The guy in the sauna fights the steamer and causes an explosion. The force of the explosion, with some shaking, helps open the door. One girl escapes, she looks back to see her friend completely fried from the explosion, so she goes to drink water, gets her pills.... AND that was just her imagination.

She was just hallucinating. That didn't happen. Oh, but wait... the explosion really happened. What?

Yes, the explosion happened. Her friend really got fried. What she saw was in her hallucination was real. But she didn't actually go out.

It's such terrible editing that one of my friends thought she had gone out, got water and then came back for her friends, locking herself accidentally again.

The story is so contrived that this is not a bad guess. The reality is that someone hallucinated something, but 50% of the hallucination was real.

Ultimately, it's a horror-thriller, but it's not fun, scary nor thrilling. It's just a bunch of kids screaming in a sauna. They scream for help, then they yell at each other, then go back to screaming for help.

Being in a room watching this film simulates this experience very well, but no one will hear your screams.

I watched this movie on the Tubi Tv app and thought that it was about a killer who locked 4 friends inside of a sauna (at least that's what the previews showed) It is nothing like the previews portrayed it to be. This movie is about a drunk friend who accidentally locks his other friends in a sauna after over hearing them talk bad about him. I don't know if he did it on purpose or if he did it on accident but he locks them in the sauna and walks away. Wade (who is portrayed as the killer in the previews) have nothing to do with locking them in the sauna, he goes off on camping trip with his buddy and doesn't find out that they're locked in there until the end. I had high hopes for this movie but was disappointed in the end.

This is not really a bad flick, and I can recommend it to anyone whose brain is in a rut and in need of 90 minutes of R and R. It is a lot like the Open Water movies except it involves fire instead of water. Three people are trapped in a sauna in a remote cabin when their friend staggers away, drunk and high, and passes out without realizing that he has left a ladder wedged against the door. There follows various unsuccessful attempts to escape and to call for help. I usually like to guess what people in such a movie will try next, whether some such attempt will eventually work, and whether the attempts and results make any sense. This one did give me something to think about, but I do not think it passed the sense test.

The problem is they have broken a small window for air, not a bad idea. But the window is located near the sensor for the thermostat which interprets the incoming air as too low a temperature. So it cranks the heat up high enough to threaten them with heat stroke. Fooling a thermostat can be a problem. In an office building where I used to work, the thermostat in a naturally cool office once cranked the heat up enough to trip the fire alarm in another office on the same thermostat.

But I think this movie had problems. Why didn't they use the towels that they had to pick up one or more of the hot rocks in the heater and hang or hold it near the temperature sensor? That should have fooled the thermostat in the opposite direction and tended to shut down the heat. I'm not sure what equilibrium temperature the room would have reached, but it should have been a lot cooler with the heater shut down most of the time. Also I don't think it likely that incoming air would have cooled the sensor without reaching the rest of the room. In fact, it seems more likely that heat would have escaped through that broken window.

But this flick had compensations. Friends making such an earnest effort to understand, survive, and escape trouble can make a movie interesting. One character, Jenna, had been trapped before and was fighting the after effects while her friend, Renee, seemed at first to have it together. As the situation progresses, they switch roles as Renee comes apart while Jenna tries to get it together. Such things are hardly new in movies, but they can raise the interest level, and it was nicely done here. Also I am getting tired of movies (and here comes a major spoiler) that seem to exist just to gradually kill off the whole cast, one by one. This was a nice exception as it threatened that sort of ending right up to very late in the movie, when we find that …… well, you get the idea.

What looks to be a promising concept for a horror movie once again collapses under the weight of its running time. "247°F" would be a great short film, but as a full length feature becomes tedious and redundant. It feels like the writers were setting you up for something shocking or a big reveal at the end but fail to deliver on their assumed promise. It's the perfect case of not wanting what you think is going to happen actually not happen, but leaving disappointed because nothing better transpired.

Four friends head up to a lakeside cabin for a weekend of fun and fireworks. Their good times go south when three of them are accidentally locked in a sweltering sauna. They must find a way to escape before the temperature reaches the lethal 247°F limit the human body can withstand before shutting down.

Here's another perfect example of a movie being too clean and clear. It was obviously shot on an HD camera and it shows. The clarity of the picture does nothing to hide the fact that what should be an old cabin looks to have been just assembled by a set crew. The cinematography doesn't completely detract from the movie but it fails to keep the viewer immersed in what they're watching either.

"247°F" will no doubt pull in a horror / slasher audience just because of its two main actors from Rob Zombie's "Halloween" and "Halloween II." Scout Taylor-Compton (Laurie Strode) plays one of the trapped friends and Tyler Mane (Michael Myers himself) plays the suspicious owner of the cabin. Unfortunately, the two of them can't save this slow-burning and monotonous thriller from descending into obscurity.

Maybe I'm just watching too many movies. This past week has been full of under-performing duds for me. I love horror flicks but I'm really struggling to find good ones lately. I thought 247 degrees actually at least looked like it had a low budget, decent story, interesting concept and some eye candy. All of that is true except the decent story part. It does have decent actors and the characters have some depth although the entire back story of the main girl feels forced and pointless. You know with the opening scene that its going to play a part in the story but it ultimately matters very little. They could have explained that arc in her story with just a few sentences of dialogue. Once they get everyone into the sauna and things could get interesting...it just doesn't. It almost completely falls apart. One reviewer stated that this could have been summed in a very interesting 30 minute episode of a TV show and that is exactly the truth. Instead it drags on with pointless sub characters and completely misses the mark of what it could have been.

Scout Taylor-Compton basically plays her "Laurie Strode" type character all over again. She's likely not a bad actress but even for being the innocent sweet girl she doesn't give much to the film. They give her this big introduction as to why her character is the way she is but it matters very little. Travis Van Winkle definitely gives the best performance in the film. Its not that he blows it away or anything but he's likable and gives the nice guy role a decent shot. Michael Copon is one of the useless characters unfortunately for him. He starts out as the stereotypical wise cracking horny "best pal" and then they basically write him out for any of the important scenes and you realize how useless his character is. Christina Ulloa is your eye candy girl. She's the confident, promiscuous friend and she actually does pretty good as well. Both her and Van Winkle fit their prospective roles and they do exactly what you expect from them and in a horror movie that's good enough for the most part. Tyler Mane is a completely disposable pointless character brought in strictly for Rob Zombie Halloween fans.

It is just disappointing for a huge horror fan like myself that has seen such countless films worthy of crap lately. Then I saw this and I hoped it would turn in at least a watchable experience. They have all their ducks in a row. Horror movies are not difficult. You can make them as typical and predictable as you like and fans will like them. The recipe is so easy. And they do use a lot of that recipe and then they forget to add the meat and potatoes and you're left with a very empty experience. The movie reads well, some of the aforementioned performances are decent enough but the story completely falls apart. This one unfortunately is a complete miss. It isn't the worst I have seen lately by any stretch of imagination but its also not worthy of wasting any time on it. 4/10

When you take 3 main characters and place them front and center the 3 becomes a whole. First off is the setting and here it's a 8x8 room with one door and a steamer (it's a sauna.). Right there alone is a mark against this movie, how much can be done in such a small space. Next characters need to be very interesting and here we have 4 friends different as night and day. Two girls one carefree, the other struggling after a tragedy 3 years pryor. Two guys one who is looking for a good time and the other out to party. Another hit that doesn't really do much here. So our characters are somewhat boring since we focus on only three of them. Finally the plot/story needs to be strong since 80% takes place in a small private sauna. This story is far from strong nor interesting and for a movie like this The story really needs to be gripping.

The stenosis is four friends out for a weekend of fun and relaxation but ends up a struggle for survival. Three gets trapped in a sauna. Can they survive with the heat climbing to 247° F. And this movie missed all three. There is no buildup, no character development, no challenge's and no suspense. Just three people stuck in a sauna slowly cooking to death. All we get are 65 minutes of them crying, yelling and arguing. Our fourth guy is no better and is...ok boring as well. One other character also brings nothing new here just chitter chatter.

Don't expect a over the top ending, it's a real let down. Our protagonist is seen off on the side feeling bad. So if you like human torture (slowly cooking to death) enjoy but if you want a good story too well not much here.

Not bad although I find it very hard to believe anyone could remain trapped in a sauna for anymore than an hour or so with the heat on.

Also when the heater is disabled they would not survive more than a few minutes of carbon monoxide poisoning so I would like to read the actual story and see how vaguely this movie is based on it.

It was pretty obvious from the start that the shy girl who passes up a drink and is frightened to have a little fun was going to survive right till the end as that is almost always what happens in a college age horror movie.

Overall I'd say it is a good movie worth watching if you're a fan of horror movies although it is a little serious for my liking. The only scene which is remotely gory is when one of the boys puts his hands and arms on the burning hot stove to try and disable it then it explodes in his face, and this again is kind of unbelievable as no-one would be able to shake a stove violently while their flesh is being cooked.