the audience applauded

Just perfect...

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

During their nightly poker game a group of lowlifes are terrorized in their own convenience store by a masked killer.The highlight of this film was obviously James Duval as Jimmy, who is going through heroin withdrawal. He puts on perhaps the best performance of his career. Although I learned to love him in the films of Gregg Araki and in "May", he seems to be starting a second -- even better -- phase of his acting, as seen here and in "Sushi Girl".While there is little else here that is all that memorable, and some moments seem a bit clichéd or hackneyed, it is not a bad little film. Certainly better than the average lower budget horror film. And it is great to see Steve Guttenberg, a wonderful actor whose time is not yet over.

While gathering together for a card game in their convenience store, a group of friends find themselves the latest victims of a serial killer's rampage against similar employees in town and race to escape before they all succumb to his fury.This one turned out to be quite exciting and enjoyable. Well, supposedly this was going to be a hybrid slasher/comedy but instead, it didn't really do either all that well and still came away rather enjoyable. The comedy elements are the biggest miscues, being not at all funny and really just lame that tend to make the film far longer than it really should be because the middle section is just so boring and dull that not a whole lot really registers. Once they come aware of their being stalked and hunted, it turns into a rather enjoyable affair with some big suspense scenes set within a location that really doesn't set itself up as being capable of doing so, and a rather nice twist that allows for some brutal kills to come along. While the killer isn't that threatening and it does have some other flaws, this one does become a lot more watchable as it goes along.Rated R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence

Being a hardened, jaded horror buff this reviewer was tired of seeing a bunch of clichéd, attractive teens with the personality of a thrift store being killed over and over by the same kind of stalker. Along came Cornered! and I must say that I'm glad that I didn't listen to all the negative feedback on this site.A group of real people are trapped in a liquor store after a killer breaks in and begins stalking them. This killer has an odd penchant for murdering convenience store clerks and the like before stealing the security footage and watching his own handy work.The pace is what scared a lot of people off and it does tend to be a little slower than one would hope for. But it's just a minor complaint as the rest of the cast performs quite well, the villain is interesting, and it held my attention for eighty-two minutes. And wasn't it nice to see Steve Guttenberg again?

The most effective scenes in this film come when it focuses on a single character, such as James Duval's Jimmy, who is hallucinating from heroin withdrawals. Steve Guttenberg, who is only in about twenty minutes of the film, also delivers some convincing lines, moving away from his typecasting as the goofy guy. He's solid here, especially in the last ten minutes. The film stays away from blood and gore, opting instead for the psychological punch. What's most interesting is the things we don't see, like the outside world, which doesn't exist here. The film is entirely focused on a single store, shunning the outside world. It's like the director wants us to be confined, along with the cast, in a single room, so that we may also experience their terror and confusion.