Robert Sheehan stars in a horror movie that very obviously wants to be a British Scream but just doesn’t have a sharp enough script to achieve that laudable goal.
X Factor judge Tulisa Contostavlos is the Drew Barrymore stand-in disembowelled in the cold open. After that there’s a showy credits sequence as the whole cast glance at each other with their names underneath as they gather in an auditorium to hear the police talk about her murder. There are a number of attacks by a masked killer on various teenagers and red herrings flung about the place, but a major difference is the existence of a suicide pact among this group, masterminded by the obnoxious Kenny whose insistence on documenting everything and maintaining strict categorical distinctions seems to make him a version of Jamie Kennedy in Scream. The in-camera analysis of story-structure is confined to the heroine explaining the idea of obstacles keeping apart lovers rather than horror clichés, but then the finale takes place in a large house with a party where the police are keeping watch along with numerous hidden cameras…
Robert Sheehan, currently wowing the West End as Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, is quite good as Archie, effectively winning our sympathy as the hero trying to dismantle the suicide club, while also displaying enough flashes of darkness in doing so to convince us that he might also be the masked serial killer. There also appears to be a moment of homage to his role as Misfits’ clown prince when Jazz shouts at him, “You’re not a f******** superhero Arch, you can’t save me.” Heroine Jenni Jacques initially makes you think that a decade ago Keira Knightley would have landed her part but she doesn’t have Knightley’s hauteur and Jasmine’s physical and emotional transformation during the film is slightly unbelievable. The other supporting players with the exception of Jason Maza’s splenetic homicidal/suicidal Kenny never flesh out their one-dimensional characters.
Writer/director Arjun Rose achieves some praiseworthy effects. Ashley Walters and Reggie Yates have some good comedic moments as the cops conducting the world’s most inept murder inquiry, a split-screen web-conversation is nicely rendered as highly coloured Warholian friezes, a crucial dialogue scene by the Thames achieves an incredibly washed-out look, and there’s a very tense hand-held night-vision escape thru a sinister house. But the script is largely perfunctory, with intriguing ideas, like Jasmine wanting to kill herself before she starts suffering hereditary dissociative identity disorder, and the possibility of Arch’s personality having been psychotically warped by witnessing his father murdering his mother, never being properly explored. The ending is an illogical muddle, including a deeply pointless final frame.
This is basic horror with disappointingly little shlock, but, just as I praised the promise shown by Donkey Punch, I think Arjun Rose has the potential to make a much better film soon.
2/5
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