As a fan of Kane Pixels for a long time I'm so happy that this lived up to my expectations. It's really a marvel of adaptation, keeping the tone of Kane's original series on YouTube and realizing it for cinema. The eponymous backrooms look great, the music sets the mood, and there are some really great liminal shots peppered throughout the film. I can appreciate that the characters aren't particularly deep, but I think this is more than made up for by having some surprisingly strong & resonant themes that give the backrooms weight (and without veering into lore dumps).

The first 3/4 of this movie are surprisingly well done, and then the ending feels a bit aimless until it cuts surprisingly short. The highlight was definitely an amazing shot at a bar where we see a bartender pull away a bottle from in font of a mirror, only to have a character perfectly framed between the remaining bottles. There are some other great flourishes, as well as some shocking moments (some of the bigotry caught me off guard). Could be enjoyable enough with some friends to mock it and/or talk over the boring parts.

The score starts off strong here (even a bit too strong in a couple of places), and there are definitely some striking moments, but overall the pacing is just too slow. At less than 70 minutes this should be an easy watch but it felt so much longer. Definitely interesting to view this as a nasty, given how little of it is that shocking for a modern audience.

This really is something special and unique. It has so much going on, from the amazingly charming costumes, to the frequent changes of scenery, to the surprisingly decent songs. A great movie to show to kids if you own it digitally, but unfortunately the physical release comes on a disc alongside Violated! and guess which one is shown on the movie selection menu.