20131009: Horror Review--Severance

Severance

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. British live action feature length film, rated R, 2006, 95 minutes, horror, comedy, drama.
2. IMDB: 6.5/10.0 from 27,148 users;  estimated budget 5 million British pounds.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 64% on the meter; 61% liked it from 135,619 audience ratings.
4. Netflix: 3.0/5.0 from 228,444 users.
5. Directed by: Christopher Smith.
6. Starring: Toby Stevens as Harris, Claudie Blakley as Jill, Andy Nyman as Gordon, Danny Dyer as Steve, Babou Ceesey as Billy, Laura Harris as Maggie, Tim Mcinnerny as Richard.


2. Setup and Plot
1. Opening sequence: two young women and a middle-aged man are running for their lives. The women fall into a pit; the man gets snared in a trap.  Does not turn out well for the man.


2. Shift to the main narrative. Seven British employees of a company called Palisade Defence are on a company bus en route to a lodge for a team-building retreat.  Their route is blocked; the local driver refuses to take a detour through some scary woods.  So they walk a mile to the lodge.


3. Palisade makes armaments.  The group in the film does PR for Palisade.  During their first meal together at the retreat, they recount imaginative stories of what the lodge served as in previous years.  The candidates were: a pre-World War I mental hospital where the inmates imprisoned the physicians; military prison for Cold War assassins who liked killing too much; sex retreat for old men; a lodge for who knows what.


4. Everyone in the group is touchy about something.


5. The first night is stormy, and Jill sees a man in a mask out her window when she's dropping a spider outside. Everyone else thinks she's excitable.  The next morning, Jill and Harris go to find better phone reception.  The rest of the group goes in for paint ball as team building.  Jill and Harris return with the company bus; they leave the dead driver behind.  After the paintball, the idiot Gordon gets caught in a bear trap.  When Billy opens the trap, Gordon just won't pull his leg out.  Billy has to let go because the trap is so strong.  This is repeated five times until Gordon's leg is severed.  Clever.


6. That was my definitive first jump the shark moment.


7. They take the bus, but someone lays down a good two dozen caltrops.  The bus gets more than one flat; how it flipped over is hard to see.  That was the second jump the shark moment.  Harris is caught under the weight of something; the man who has been observing them beheads him.  Jill walks around, but the stranger shows up behind her.


8. Maggie, Billy, Richard, Gordon, and Steve are left.  The stranger had tied Jill up to a tree; he burns her alive.  The survivors return to the lodge and lock themselves in.


9. While Maggie and Steve are sharing a cigarette, the stranger comes in and takes away Gordon.  The four look around the bowels of the lodge, following Gordon's screams as the stranger vivisects him.  Lovely.  They find the stranger, who puts a shotgun blast into Billy's chest.  Billy's still able to fine-control his movements, even with the gaping hole in his chest, before he passes away.  That was the third jump the shark moment.


10. Maggie, Richard, and Steve are left.  Steve stays in the lodge; Maggie runs for the hills, as does Richard.  Of course, they are not together.  Maggie returns to the lodge, hm.  Steve puts a long knife through the stranger, and Maggie gives him a shotgun blast through the head.


11. Maggie and Steve go outside the lodge, only to find that more strangers await them.  Maggie drops one, but she's out of ammunition.  They find Richard, who knows that he is standing on a mine.  Richard distracts the strangers for a bit.


12. Maggie and Steve find George, the corporate CEO, who is partying with two young women at the actual lodge where the team-building was supposed to be held.  This brings us back to the opening sequence, where George meets his end.  Maggie gets snared.  She gets the better of the one who releases her.  Steve takes out two of the attackers, but is badly wounded in the process.  He helps the two women out of the hole.


13. While looking for a way to get help, Maggie sees a lot of Palisade ordinance.  She telephones for assistance, but the stranger with the flame thrower who killed Jill catches up with her.  The women with Steve find her before she gets hacked to death.  The foursome makes it to the lake and presumably to freedom.


3. Conclusions
1. One sentence summary:  Lots of gore and action, but motivations are still largely unrevealed.
2. Two stars of five.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 6/10 Bright, well-focused and framed.  Looks fine during the daylight intervals.  Some of the night footage is truly bad, though.


2. Sound: 6/10 Fine for conversation, but the incidental music is anti-appropriate and too loud.


3. Acting: 7/10 OK for the most part. I even recognized some of the actors.


4. Screenplay: 1/10 Liked the section where George fires a rocket at their attackers, but ends up taking down a commercial jet instead.  Other than that, there were too many jump the shark moments.