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Bargain Bin Review: Clive Barker’s Jericho
Let me paint a picture for you. It is 2007. We are all young and thin. Roger Ebert says video games can’t be art and Clive Barker steps up and says, “You’re wrong Ebert and Jericho will prove it!” Meanwhile we are all playing Bioshock and need no further evidence that games are indeed art, but we appreciate Clive Barker standing up for us, because Hellraiser scared us when we were kids. I found Jericho in the bargain bin recently and decided give Barker’s argument for games as art a shot. Find out what I thought about it after the break.
You play as the Jericho Squad, an elite branch of the military with supernatural abilities. You start out as the leader of the Jericho Squad, Ross, who dies and can then possess the other members of your team allowing you to utilize their unique abilities. The other characters are token black guy, stereotyped Hispanic person, preacher with a troubled past, angry lesbian sniper, girl with sword and girl who can slow down time. The characters are all poorly developed with no character development and they are topped off with some pretty bad voice acting. Although if you are a fan of B horror movies these points may be a plus to you.
Anyway, your mission is to investigate a paranormal disturbance in the middle east, You discover that the disturbance is being caused by the Firstborn, God’s failed first attempt at creating man. The Firstborn is trying to escape and it is up to the Jericho Squad to stop it. You travel through rifts in time sealing the breach so the Firstborn doesn’t escape. That about covers it for plot. Nothing to get too excited over.
Gameplay isn’t that enthralling either. It fails to deliver scares since you almost always have your squad with. Moving around with a squad six means you don’t have to fear the enemy since you always out gun them. Each character has powers and weapons unique to them, but it doesn’t matter since you’ll be spending most of your time using your favorite character and only using the others when the game forces you to. The levels are incredibly linear and yet somehow you will find yourself getting lost. You’ll also get hit up by the occasional quick time event that force to input a nonsensical button combination in order to proceed. Boss fights don’t offer much of a challenge other than sometimes being frustrating when there is no clear indication on how to proceed through the fight.
In the end Jericho is just another bland FPS. Playing it you can see the potential it had to be a good game, but it constantly fails to deliver. If you really must play this game or you’re a die hard Barker fan, rent this game and don’t take it too seriously and you can probably have a good time. I found once I shut off my brain I started to have a good time with it. One last point to put a bitter taste in your mouth. If you like to cheat you have to pay for the cheat codes. That’s right, you have to pay to unlock cheat codes already programmed into the game. Smooth Codemasters, smooth.
By: Ryan Weissmuller
Let’s start with the good news. Lockbox looks far better than its misleading marketing materials suggest, a supernatural horror movie so darkly lit and color graded that you’ll have to squint your way through jump scares. It’s also anchored by reliable genre performers. That’s also about where the good news ends with this rote adaptation of Knifepoint Horror Podcast story “Winthrop.”
The empathetic Carla Gugino gives her all as Ellen, a saint of a woman with boundless patience who takes on life’s hard luck with a kind smile. After giving up her career as a fashion designer to become caretaker for a dying mother, she’s then forced to reinvent herself once more when her caretaker role ends. That catches us up to the events of Lockbox, where Ellen is asked to take in a cousin she hasn’t seen in quite some time who’s dealing with severe PTSD.
Just as Ellen finally establishes a real connection with Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci), it’s interrupted by the arrival of peculiar neighbor Vahna (Katharine Isabelle), who spells clear trouble. When Vahna shows up dead, it sets in motion a supernatural battle of possession.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
Director Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism, Prey for the Devil) and screenwriter Justin Yoffe approach Lockbox in the broadest of brushstrokes, dooming it from the start with clunky storytelling and woefully underdeveloped themes of heady topics like PTSD. Winthrop is a character that comes loaded with emotional baggage and trauma that’s piled on throughout his tragic life, but much like its title, his interiority and history are treated like a tightly guarded secret meant to prolong the supernatural mystery.
The problem here, though, is that Lockbox is too sparse to sustain mystery at all, and it instead robs Winthrop of characterization. It winds up trapping the talented Pucci without anywhere to go, toggling between wounded animal and mentally disoriented.
From there, Lockbox bounds through plot developments without any sense of stakes or purpose, peppered by a smattering of haphazard paint-by-numbers jump scares. The only unwavering constant is Ellen’s resolute faith, and Stamm seems to leave it entirely to Gugino to guide confused audiences through this inconsequential story right up until its supernatural climax.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
To give more credit, Lockbox at least injects an unconventional exorcism here; just don’t expect much in the way of explanation. When the film finally reveals the meaning behind its title, it dangles a fascinating carrot it has zero interest in delivering. More than a severe lack of fleshing out its characters beyond plot drivers or devices, this faith-based flick also seems terrified to offer any worldbuilding whatsoever.
Yoffe’s script stretches the short story beyond its means instead of fleshing it out, and Stamm fills out the gaps with cheap CGI scares and overwrought performances; Isabelle’s Vahna is beyond cartoonish in her villainy. It’s also pretty nonsensical, treating only Ellen’s faith with the utmost sincerity and largely squandering its typically reliable talent. So much so that the final imagery, pure sunkissed saccharine sentimentality, leaves you with the feeling that this horror movie might be better suited as an entry in Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Lockbox releases in select theaters on July 3, 2026.
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