NO ONE LIVES opens with a woman screaming for her life and running through the woods. She doesn’t get very far before she’s strung up in a tree. Cut to a man named Driver (Luke Evans, who is set to play Eric Draven in THE CROW remake) and his lover Betty (Laura Ramsey, 2008’s THE RUINS), who have taken to the road and seem to be on the run from something.
And since road trips in horror movies never occur without incident or loss of limbs, the couple, after a stay at the Highwayman Motel, soon has a run-in with a band of roughneck thieves. There’s Hoag (Lee Tergesen, who played Tobias Beecher on HBO’s OZ), Ethan (Brodus Clay, who you may or may not recognize as the WWE superstar who goes by the nickname “The Funkasaurus”), Denny (Beau Knapp, SUPER 8), and Flynn (Derek Magyar, BOY CULTURE), and they know that Driver and Betty have a personal connection to the woman from the opening scene, an heiress named Emma Ward (Adelaide Clemens, THE GREAT GATSBY), who scrounged up enough energy to etch “Emma Alive” into the tree. Whatever business her family is in must be good since they’ve offered $2 million for any information.
You expect certain things from a movie called NO ONE LIVES, and, as predicted, it lives up to its title. The movie offers up plenty of gory images ranging from impalements and bullet wounds to explosions and beheadings. It is directed by Japanese filmmaker Ryuhei Kitamura, whose adaptation of Clive Barker’s THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN proved popular with genre fans. Kitamura has an eye for the gruesome and makes every death scene more extreme and bloody than the last.
One of the more unsettling things about NO ONE LIVES is that each character seems capable of performing any sort of gross act that would leave the rest in a puddle of their own blood. Most of the damage, though, comes from Driver, who proves to be one of the more sadistic killers in recent horror. When he’s asked by a near-dead victim why she’s on the ground bleeding, he responds, “I guess you were just unlucky.” What’s more, his motivation—not mommy issues or a mental disorder, but money—is human and so that much more terrifying.
But despite its strong points, NO ONE LIVES isn’t a very original effort. It’s written by newcomer David Cohen, who clearly put all of his time in front of the computer into concocting the kills and none into a strong plot. That may not be all that important to the target audience, but even they may get bored waiting for the next death.
Video: 2.40:1 in 1080p with MPEG-4 AVC codec. As most of NO ONE LIVES takes place at night, it was a must that the black levels on this Blu-ray be strong. And while they are for the most part steady, it is far too often that characters (who are covered in blood for the most part) get lost in the darkness.
Audio: English Dolby TrueHD 5.1. Subtitles in English and Spanish. This is an effective audio transfer that puts its score and sound effects (the wood chipper, the gunfire) to great use.
From the Script to the Crypt (27:42): This featurette uses interviews and on-set footage to look at the excessive blood, makeup and more of NO ONE LIVES.