The Ascent (AKA Black Ops): A special ops mercenary squad are in the midst of a civil war, their mission is to retrieve intel but they encounter a strange prisoner. It's pretty savage, prisoners are being massacred by the civil war combatants and the team leader wants no complications. The team return to HQ in England and that's when things start going weird. The lifts are broken so they take the stars. But these stairs seem never ending, an explosion occurs, alarms go off, red lights flash. Then some thing starts to pick them off. Time loops where they try to change the past. A figure pulling a mercenary over a railing, horror on the stairs. But the real horror is their own actions and those of others in reiterations of the civil war events. A bit overlong at 102 minutes, a tighter horror thriller would have resulted from a 90 minute running time. It's a good story though and while it is quite violent, much of the horror is psychological. Written & Directed by Tom Paton (Redwood). On the Horror Channel. 7/10.
Black Ops
2019
Action / Horror / Sci-Fi
Black Ops
2019
Action / Horror / Sci-Fi
Plot summary
Special ops squad "Hell's Bastards" are sent to infiltrate a civil war to retrieve intel. The unit soon find themselves trapped on a never-ending stairwell forced to climb or die. To survive, they must revisit their past sins if they ever want to get off.
Uploaded by: FREEMAN
Director
Tech specs
720p.WEB 1080p.WEBMovie Reviews
Horror & Time Loops
This movie was a bit of a disaster from the very first scene!
Potentially interesting idea if you can actually figure out what the idea was but with execrable acting , dreadful fight scenes, laugh-a-minute dialogue and the usual constant foul language which I feel these days is incredibly sad and denigrates all the old movies of the past that did not need to use it, combined with poor special effects quickly put paid to that notion!
Film fell apart quite quickly and I began that "clock watching - when is it finishing scenario" after they started repeating the same interminably boring action sequence over and over again for over 2 hours...yes two hours of your life you will never get back.
I read the reviews first and a "Promising first 10 minutes" was a bit generous and out by around 9 minutes!
Barely a horror film, in fact barely a film at all it was that boring and tedious watching some of the worst acting ever put to celluloid...or was it a cheapo Xiaomi handy-cam? hard to be sure with the constant blue filter used to mask some of the poor scenery and effects!
The film looks like it was partly shot on a field in the middle of Milton Keynes with a couple of old army vehicles borrowed from the local scrapyard and inside the stairwell of a block of flats in Peckham - sadly Del Boy and Rodney did not turn up in their three wheeler to alleviate the boredom!
The fact the movie cannot be found on going under its name as I am watching it on the horror channel of "The Ascent" also makes me scratch my head; even more so when I do another search and up comes the Imdb page with a Dvd cover under the name "BLACK OPS" or under Amazon as Legacy - Black Ops but the name of the movie on Imdb is the highly original "STAIRS" makes me shake my head even more. It is as if they were looking for the best clickbait title they could find that would hoodwink the unfortunate punter...sadly none worked!
As always I did hang in until the end....unfortunately!!! You would be better of just hanging yourself than watching this utter British drivel! Summary: Dreadful from first scene to the mind numbing last!
Fast-forward is your friend
I watched the first 14 minutes, fast-forwarded to around 60 minutes, heard a terrible line of dialogue then fast-forwarded to the last 22 minutes.
Shane Ward is the lead. That should be your first red flag. The constant blue filter should be your second. The terrible acting should be enough for you to turn this film off. If you've stuck around to see how the premise is executed, more fool you! The 1 star reviews are accurate. Anybody who gives this higher must've been on drugs when they watched it and I envy them.
Written and directed by Tom Paton. Remember the name so you can avoid anything else he's attached to.