Aha! As the Partridge used to say. Back of the net! Etc. Actually this is trash. Total trash. But it’s the kind of trash I’ve been rooting around for.
The trouble with a lot of modern American films is that they’re populated with the most disgusting abominations of sub humanity imaginable. Rather like Trumpist America itself. A cesspool of self-interested armed aggressors.
It’s therefore kind of appropriate that ‘they’ – the gang that starts the movie by butchering a family who return to find said gang robbing their home – kidnap a monster even more depraved than themselves, who then serves ‘justice’, American style, i.e. sadistic ultra-violence, upon them.
The film starts, you might say ‘cleverly’, but I think that’d be misplaced, with the ‘final girl’ scene, as Emma (Adelaide Clemens) – the human McGuffin of the movie – runs through the woods. Flynn (Derek Magyar) the most repellent of the gang, becomes a kind of macho substitute ‘final girl’. Or is that role actually reserved for Denny (Beau Knapp)?
Luke Evans is The Driver, a sociopathic and psychopathic mass-murderer and kidnapper, with a trailer full of kill-kit and a babe in both passenger seat and boot. The former may be the latest in his Stockholm Syndrome experiments, the latter is Emma.
America is unwell, this sort of product is a symptom of the disease. And yet, decadent and hypocritical as this may be, it is kind of entertaining. Oh, humanity… I would weep for us all… but I’ve been all cried out for some time now.