Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Review: Severance
Severance is a new horror-comedy from England that is being sold with a tasty quote claiming the film is 'as witty as Shaun of the Dead, as scary as The Descent'. It's neither. It's also simply not as good as those films. It's showing internationally at festivals at the moment where it is getting generally good responses, so before those turn into Internet hype and ruin what actual joy there is in this film with inflated expectations, take a step back, breathe deeply, and relax. I'll start with the good bits...
The film does have some decent horror business to give you. There's a leg caught in a man-trap that leads to an ongoing series of gags that are pretty fun and there's a knife-up-an-arsehole sequence that, amazingly, isn't spoiled by me telling you it's going to happen. It made me say 'Oh shit!' very loudly in the cinema for which alone I should probably give this film a positive review.
I'm not going to though.
Here's the set up of the film: a bunch of English office workers go to Hungary for a team-building weekend of paintballing and orienteering. The Hungarian coach driver refuses to take them down a particular road so they start walking, get lost, find a run down old house and then start getting picked off by a bunch of psychos hidden in the woods.
We are introduced to the inneffectual manager, the spliff smoking wide-boy, the oxbridge arsehole, the eager-to-please geek, the nice English lady, the very attractive American lady and the nice black man. You're already narrowing down who's going to get killed, and you'll mostly be right.
The one added twist to this is that they work for an arms manufacturer, which is used for some easy digs at arms manufacturers at the beginning and some plot later on.
The clunky attempts at satire (think Robocop without the bite) mark out the film as a low achiever right from the get go, and the character introductions are never more than competant. You get their basic charcater types and their basic relatioships with each other. It's effective enough but it never has the accuracy of Shaun's characters, the easy chemistry of the teens in An American Werewolf in London, nor even the extreme characterisations of films like Hostel.
If a movie succeeds in making you accept the group of people you are following, even though you know the genre of the film you are watching, you will find yourself not wanting the 'horror' things to happen and be surprised and shocked when they do. Here, when a character starts talking about a severed head still being conscious, you get the deflating feeling of knowing exactly what is about to happen to them. When, on their first night in the abondoned house, the director is already resorting to loud-noise jump scares, walking slowly down dark corridors and fake-out dream sequences, you know you are watching a horror made strictly by the numbers.
But much worse than that, the film-makers seem to have little understanding of how comedy and horror fit together. Most of the movie consists of straight comedy scenes followed by straight horror scenes. Apart from being lazy writing, it actually undermines either effect.
Take the ineffectual manager for example: When faced with a crisis he gets stroppy, makes bad decisions and makes threats to hide his insecurities. In a comedy these failings are funny, but in a horror film the audience will take them far more seriously. He is acting like a tyrant and he is leading them towards death. So when the character acts like a buffoon in a later scene purely for comic effect, it just doesn't work. No-one is laughing, leaving the actor to flail about in silence.
Or the scene where the nice English lady gets it. Here is a chance for the film-makers to up the ante and show that they have serious horror-balls. The nice lady doesn't deserve to be killed. The nice lady is your mum. Killing the nice lady in a serious and and gruesome fashion will terrorise the audience to the point of being completely in the film-makers' hands. Instead they go for some silly business with matches that won't light and a cheesily oversized flamethrower. It isn't funny, and it isn't scary.
It also isn't that gory. The kill, as with most of the kills, is not shown. Mostly we get the aftermath, almost never the event. Here we see the flamethrower throwing flames at the camera and then we get a white out.
The film seems to be holding back. It's never willing to show the really disgusting stuff because it thinks that will stop it being funny and it never builds up any real momentum of laughter because it is constantly dropping in scenes of un-ironic, if not that successful, horror.
I (and the audience I was with) never got to that gasping sort of laughter when the film-maker has made something truly terrible absolutely hilarious. Like the rape in Miike's Visitor Q, the flying eyeball in Evil Dead 2 or, for that matter, Vincent Vega accidentally shooting the kid sitting in the back of his car.
The knife in the arsehole is close, and there is another gag involving a brand new rocket launcher that it is in such poor taste it would be worthy of applause if I thought it was deliberately so. However it's either a piece of random silliness or, more likely and far worse, it's an attempt at making some satirical point about the relationship between arms manufacturers and terrorists. The film this fumbling can not suddenly think it can make serious statements. I won't let it.
Low budget genre films are often hucksterish and surrounded by blatantly untrue claims as to their qualities and ambitions. It's part of their charm. This film's belief that it has something to say is patronising. Its hubris in thinking it can move beyond mere horror-comedy and reach pointed satire is entirely uncharming. As it is it does not even achieve horror-comedy.
A character shoots a seemingly dead baddie in the head and says something to the effect of 'well I wouldn't want them coming back later' in a nod to the killer-not-being-really-dead cliche in a lot of horror movies. Subtle piece of meta-humour or sub-Scream attempt at cleverness? You tell me.
It doesn't even look that good. At least The Descent, once it gets onto the cave is legitimately cinematic. This looks and feels like a tv-movie. Director Christopher Smith has made one other horror movie and directed some British TV. Perhaps he is truly passionate about horror, but this feels like another middle-class media type playing at horror because he knows he can get the budget for it.
Underachieving.
5 middle managers out of 10
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