Yesterday I watched this Russian Horror movie called Trackman (Putevoy Obkhodchik).  It is directed by Igor Shavlak.  The story goes like this: a group of people hold up a bank and take a few hostages, and in order to escape from the cops go on the run, and make their way into the abandoned railway tunnels beneath Moscow.  And, soon they are picked off one by one, by the mysterious Trackman!  The Trackman is a huge hulking guy who carries a device with which he gouges out his victims' eyes.  The group must team together and find a way out of the tunnels before the Trackman gets to them all.

Sounds awesome, right?  Sure, the story isn't anything special (think From Dusk Till Dawn, except instead of a vampire movie you have a Jason Voorhees-type slasher after these poor souls), but with the right execution, this would have been one memorable movie (and, just check out that awesome poster above!).  Sad to say this was not the case at all.  These people had access to some nice grimy tunnels to shoot this movie in.  But it wasn't used to its potential at all.  Zero tension, no scares (a few fake boo-scares would have been much appreciated), and a "monster" that was ineffective for the most part.  Often, the Trackman would come up to someone and then disappear without doing anything, atleast if they had used these occasions to throw in some fake scares it would have been good, but we didn't get that also!  They could have piled on the gore or the violence to make it memorable, but even in this department, it felt they were playing it safe by not showing anything too disturbing.

The worst offender though for me, was the characterisation.  None of the characters (now, this includes the Trackman as well!) were developed, as a result, you don't get to know anything about them and thus won't care.  It didn't help that some of the characters were irritating as well (the cop).  Comparing the movie with From Dusk Till Dawn again — many of the characters in that film were scum.  But you got to know their motivations so cared about what happened to them.  Plus they were cool.  Nothing remarkable here though.  On the positive side I have to say some of the scenes looked pretty nice (the opening scene, where two characters plan the heist was stylish, but it felt like it belonged in a different movie).  But on the whole, Trackman was a big disappointment for me.

I've only seen two other Russian movies till date, the fantastic Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor) and its sequel, Day Watch (Dnevnoy Dozor) from director Timur Bekmambetov.  Perhaps my expectations were unrealistically high for Trackman on the basis of those two.  Still, I wish I could highlight something as being extremely remarkable about it, but there is nothing like that to be found here.  It feels fake and empty somehow.  Curiously, the Sanjay Dutt movie Dus came to mind, which aspired to be a crime/spy thriller but fell completely flat.