With its gang of cartoon villains and wardrobe of bikinis, this low-budget thriller is reminiscent of old-style video nasties
For all its effective use of modern drone cinematography, this survival horror is very much a throwback to the video nasties of the 1980s. The villains are essentially cartoons: a heavily accented human trafficker (Sean Cronin) who comes complete with facial scar, cigar and goons. These are a big lad with stringy hair and an eye patch (Glenn Salvage), an even bigger lad with some painful-looking skin problems (Jon-Paul Gates), a dude who looks like he’s auditioning to play bass for Metallica (Mark Haldor), and a “pretty boy”, Jude (Louis James). Jude, a reasonably normal-looking guy, acts as a front for their outfit, a gang whose objective is to obtain 10 thin, blond women to be packed into a storage container and shipped to a wealthy client who remains faceless – we know him only from his voice and cufflinks.
The heroines are the kidnapped women: nurse Karla (Sarah Alexandra Marks), abuse survivor Lucy (Sophie Rankin), plus various smaller roles. The film sets its stall out in a tense opening four minutes, in which we open on a blond woman (Ksenia Islamova) in a pink string bikini and Pamela-Anderson-circa-1995 bleached denim cutoffs, sprinting breathily through the desert, pursued by a guy who looks as if he has been chucked out of the WWE for plagiarising The Undertaker’s shtick.
Continue reading...
0 Comments