Reviewed by Michael Edwards
Stars Robert Boulter, Sian Breckin, Tom Burke, Nicholas Burley,
Julian Morris, Jan Taylor, Jaime Winstone
Written by Oliver Blackburn, David Bloom
Produced by Robin Gutch, Mark Herbert
Certification UK 18 | Ireland 18
Runtime 99 minutes
Directed by Oliver Blackburn
A British thriller, a rarity in cinemas these days, Donkey Punch is a strange combination of cheesy 80s thriller Dead Calm (Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill stuck on a boat with Billy Zane going nuts) and recent teen slasher flick All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. We start out with three northern lasses getting ready to go out. It's Mallorca, it's hot and they're in skimpy clothes. At a bar they meet three blokes who try and impress them. Then they decide togo with the guys to their yacht and have a party out in the open sea. This proves to be a pretty silly move as the drink, drugs and debauchery escalate until tragedy strikes and one of their number is killed (the way in which they die is given away by the title if you care to investigate). As you'd expect, they all get a bit tense after their mate dies, and this tension leads to fear which, (as yoda taught us so long ago) leads to anger, and anger leads to hatred, hatred leads to suffering. In this context suffering should be equated to violent deaths: stabbings, shredded by an outboard motor and the like.
Sticking a bunch of kids on a boat and put them in a tough situation is, to be fair, a good pretext for a thriller. It's an enclosed space, nobody can see or hear what's going on and there's plenty of props with which to bludgeon, slice or stab a shipmate. What's more the scene begins with a certain amount of promise; the youngsters are a strange mixture of confident and naive and the cinematography and style set a great tone of glossiness and grittiness which work well with the drugs and debauchery. But I can't help but think that this film failed to live up to that promise.
The main issue that Donkey Punch has is that it vacillates too much between the horror and thriller genres. There is a lot of tension built up, only to be punctuated by increasingly silly killings. At no point was the tension wholly unbearable and at no point did I feel completely lost as to what would happen, the formulaic step by step approach to each stage of the melee between the suspicious young sailors meant that each killing could be seen a mile off. A thriller should be about mounting tension and confusion in the chaos, this is utterly shattered when the film moves too far into the horror genre and becomes about setting up the next death. Not only do you lose tension because of the predictability, but it's hard to feel the tension when you're too busy laughing because a previously scared young lady has just charged someone down with an outboard motor.
The bottom line is just that Donkey Punch shied away from what it could have been, it lacked the confidence to go headlong into the dirty, gritty horror promised at the start, and was too scared of becoming boring to allow the tension to build for long enough to create a taut thriller. It gets a lot of the basics right by being so cautious (location, occasional witty banter, lack of archetypal horror or thriller 'baddies') but just doesn't quite make the grade.