Furnace: A movie that didn't warm the cockles of my heart.

Not intended to endorse usage of any brand of furnace...

To paraphrase Denis Leary, Furnace didn't warm the cockles of my heart, or even the sub-cockle region. It made me jump a couple of times with cheap tricks, showed some gruesome burns, and left me a bit confused at what story it wanted to tell.

I knew I was in trouble when it said it was based on a true story. That usually means, at least in this genre, some lazy writing and an over-reliance on gore, or other sensationalist distractions from lack of plot or direction. Fortunately it wasn't as bad as I expected, and didn't have anywhere near as much gore as I anticipated, but they threw in a lot of fire and smoke hoping you wouldn't notice that the characters were directionless, and the plot meandered the chalk outline drawn around the body of what should have been a solid story.

It starts off with a man driving home with his thumb missing, a bandage around the bloody stump. He walks into his house where his lovely young wife is waiting to celebrate their anniversary. He goes into the bathroom without saying a word to her, has some flashbacks, and then, bang! He shoots himself dead.

Back to the prison where the guards are monitoring prisoners doing excavation work for some inexplicable reason. There's some spooky stuff, and another death, and you start thinking maybe things will begin to make sense. Meanwhile Detective Michael Turner, played be Michael Paré is investigating the suicide of the what turns out to be a prison guard, flirts with the coroner who will be investigating other mysterious prison deaths, and reveals that he's full of all sorts of angst over the death of his own family. There is some fun dialogue at the precinct, I'll give the movie that much, but there's not enough of it to sustain me.

It doesn't help that Jenny McShane (the wooden actress from Shark Attack 3) plays the prison psychologist, and does it with the same quality of acting that lands her roles like Shark Attack 3. She ends up being the convenient 'love interest' (a.k.a. 'convenient person to have sex with when the script calls for your character to be all sensitive and vulnerable about his past') to Michael Paré's character. Considering how much chemistry he had with the coroner, and how interested his character was in the coroner, this made absolutely no sense in the story, and felt as forced as most of Jenny's lines sounded.

The storyline of the prison was at least easy enough to follow. The original warden was a cruel, sick bastard with a thing for little girls. A simpleminded man walked in on the warden right after he accidentally knocked the child to the ground, unconscious, blood streaming from a wound on her head. The warden scared the poor man into helping him dispose of of what he believed to be her dead body, and only until she'd been placed in the furnace and it had been turned on did she wake up and start screaming. The warden tells the simple man he's to blame, but somehow gets himself caught up in the flames and dies, as well, leaving only the simple man to know the truth. This man goes to prison for the death of the warden, and becomes the resident wacko. The old furnace is walled up for years, and then for some reason is being opened back up. The girl's remains are discovered during the investigation of the deaths of the prisoners and guard.

This could have been a nice, creepy ghost story with an ending that makes things right for the poor child and the evil warden. It veers off course trying to endear us to the detective, interest us in the psychiatrist, and make us jump with weird camera angles and shadows rushing past the camera. The ending just drags on and on, and could have done without the requisite prison riot setup. Instead of going for atmospheric and brooding, Furnace just went for the easy scare, and the boring waste of my time.