Review by Rich Wilson
Stars Stephanie Chapman-Baker, Sam Cohan, Valene Kane,
Neil Limpow, Lutz Michael | Written by Cosimo Alema & Daniele Persica
UK certification 18 | UK RRP £19.99 | BD Region B | Runtime 93 minutes | Directed by Cosimo Alema
Here’s an odd little thriller, concieved funded and filmed in Italy, starring a mixture of European actors, that takes some fairly worn ideas and frankly adds nothing new to them. A group of friends led by sisters Lara & Monica head into woods and wasteland for a game of paintball-style air soft and encounter a trio of territory-holding ex-soldiers who start hunting them for sport.
It turns out the wastelands are old army training grounds where years earlier enemies have been tortured. After one of their party goes missing, an old slaughterhouse dripping with the carcasses of dead dogs is discovered, and shadowed figures start to appear in the woods the problems, and the deaths begin.
Director Alema has a background in music video production, and it shows in the tinted and coloured visuals. It’s also fairly evident he’s better suited to a four minute promo than a full length feature. There are scenes that work - a encounter between the sisters, one captured and one in hiding, is tense and upsetting - but there’s not enough of substance to sustain the viewer. Mostly this is people running around the woods with a kill thrown in every quarter-hour to break the boredom. There’s nothing wrong with that but we need to care about the characters in peril, and in this case the film doesn’t try to establish it. You’ll spend more time trying to figure out which actors have been dubbed and which haven’t.
There’s a lot of mileage to be gotten from the townies-hunted-in-wilderness genre; from classics like Deliverance and Southern Comfort through to present day shockers like Eden Lake, and sadly War Games suffers from the fact we’ve all seen this story done before and better. There’s no explanation why the soldiers have suddenly turned into murderers, and more than once people go missing and just never reappear. It’s all fairly pointless, and might well have worked better as a short feature. Or perhaps, a heavy metal rock video. There are much better choices around than this.
EXTRAS Nothing more than a trailer, which bizarrely, seems to offer more explanation than the movie.