Severance

Severance (2006)

Directed by: Christopher Smith
Written by: Christopher Smith and James Moran
Starring: Danny Dyer, Laura Harris, Tim McInnerny, Babou Ceesay, David Gilliam, Andy Nyman, Toby Stephens, Claudie Blakley, Juli Drajkó, Judit Viktor, János Oláh

Horror-comedy involving a group of people out for a team building weekend in Hungary getting hacked up, burned, and generally killed in nasty ways by a bunch of ex-military psychos.

It kind of makes me wonder, what the hell do we have against Eastern Europe? I mean, their tourist slogan might as well be 'Come to Slovakia - home of Hostel'. I guess there are some pretty big, dark forests there and everybody talks like Dracula.

Well, anyway. I haven't actually seen Hostel as yet, but I have seen the trailers, and stylistically this movie seems to be along the same lines. Only this is, like, funny.

It's got some pretty good dialogue and amusing/disgusting scenes (if this stuff were happening in real life it would probably be really horrible but in this context, it's pretty funny). And the cast is pretty good - Laura Harris played Daisy on Dead Like Me. Yay! Mr. Green also informs me that Danny Dyer has something to do with football.

Mind you, it's no Shaun of the Dead. The characters aren't really that good, but the acting sort of makes up for it.

And it's actually set in Hungary, as opposed to some really crappy low budget movies (I don't know what the budget of this movie was, but it probably wasn't terribly high - it looked pretty good though) shot in Hungary or Romania or someplace but are set in, like New Jersey. If this was a video, I could make all kinds of jokes about that, but it doesn't really come off right in writing.

So not a great movie, but entertaining enough and better than a lot of stuff. While watching it, I kept thinking 'If this were a Friday the 13th movie, this person would be dead by now'. It tickled me, having seen way too many puritanical, moralistic slasher movies, that the last man standing was the mushroom head. Spoilers.

It kind of changes the formula there, anyway. Maybe because it's British. I don't know. Yep, nice change (for me, anyway) from American slasher films from the '80s. Just a bit of entertainment for, like, 90 minutes.

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