Severance

Stars: Danny Dyer, Laura Harris, Tim McInnerny, Toby Stephens, Claudie Blakley, Andy Nyman

Director: Christopher Smith

This semi-joky horror film - a curiously outmoded mixture (reminiscent of such offerings in the 1970s) that doesn't always work - finds seven employees of a weapons firm on an unlikely team-building trip to the Hungaro-Romanian borders.

Close to its destination, their coach is halted by a fallen tree. Jabbering in Hungarian, the driver flees.

Now if you had to walk the rest of the way, you'd climb over the tree and stick to the main road, wouldn't you? But no. The group takes a track through the forest. Yeah right.

Anyway, arriving not at the promised luxury hotel, but a dilapidated lodge, they are soon being hunted down by a masked killer - or should it be killers? - having thoroughly scared themselves with grisly (fictional) accounts of the lodge's possibly sinister history.

One of these, treated as a silent movie, is amusingly inventive, but the movie soon descends to routine hack-and-chop slaughter, the often hideous resultant carnage somehow escaping the British censor with a 15 certificate.

David Quinlan

UK/Hungary 2006. UK Distributor: Pathé. Colour.
96 minutes. Not widescreen. UK certificate: 15.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 1, Violence/Horror 3, Drugs 1, Swearing 2.

Review date: 20 Aug 2006