Out today on Blu-ray from WellgoUSA is Row 19, a new Russian airplane horror-thriller. A young woman doctor, who survived a plane crash as a child, is taking a flight with her own daughter during a snowstorm when strange things begin to happen to the other passengers. The story unfolds at a fast clip over its brief 78-minute run time and there are some nice, spooky effects throughout.
Row 19 does a passable job of serving up the thrills. If you enjoyed similar airplane horror movies like Redeye and Flight 7500; Row 19 will make for a good Friday night popcorn film. A word of warning though, watch the original Russian language with English subtitles. The English dub option is ‘Manos: the hands of fate’ level goofy and it makes it impossible to take the film seriously and ruins the suspense. Much like Manos, grown adults voice four-year-old’s and everyone else sounds like they’re just reading off the page, it’s cringe inducingly bad.
The rest of the disc release is less than impressive. The Blu-ray cover art, shown above, is effectively well done and creepy, but the disc otherwise only includes the trailer and some other previews. Something, anything; a behind the scenes, an interview, a commentary, would have really added value to the disc over and above just containing the film.
Adam Ruhl is a writer and life long Cinephile. He is the Executive
Cinema Editor of Pop Culture Beast’s Austin branch; covering festivals,
conventions, and new releases. When not filing reports, Adam can be
found stalking Alamo Drafthouse Programmers for leads on upcoming
DrafthouseFilms titles. Adam once blocked Harry Knowles entrance to a
theater until he was given extra tickets to a Roman Polanski movie.