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SEVERANCE
Directed by: Christopher Smith.
Produced by: Jason Newmark.
Written by: Moran & Smith.
Director of Photography: Ed Wild.
Edited by: Stuart Gazzard.
Music by: Christian Henson.
Released by Magnolia Pictures.
Language: English.
Country of Origin: UK/Germany. 96 min. Rated R.
With: Toby Stephens, Claudie Blakley, Andy Nyman, Babou Ceesay, Tim McInnerny, Laura Harris, Danny Dyer & David Gilliam.

Christopher Smith’s Severance starts as many horror movies tend to, with a glimpse from the film’s last act serving as a big bloody introduction – a way to get the audience adjusted right away to the tone. Then the pop song “Itchycoo Park” kicks in over the opening credits as a totally ironic gesture. This tactic Smith uses from time to time in his story of a group from Palisade Defense, an international weapons company, off on a retreat in the middle of the woods in Eastern Europe. The team includes psychedelic mushrooms-ingesting Steve (Danny Dyer); the nebbish leader, Richard (Tim McInnery); sexy Maggie (Laura Harris), the apple of Richard’s eye (as we see in a too-easily constructed sex dream from his POV); Jill, the more pragmatic but neurotic nerd girl (Claudie Blakley); and the token black guy, Billy (Babou Ceesay), who becomes the brunt of at least one awkward race joke while on the bus ride to the camp.

After the driver runs off and the bus breaks down (or more approximately, gets derailed by some spikes), the employees walk to an abandoned cabin, where teamwork skills will be tested via games like paintball. The co-workers theorize about what used to be out there in the woods: one guess, an unconventional mental hospital; another, a sex camp; but one comes closer, and frighteningly so, to the truth (an army base.) When the by-the-books nerdy salesman, Gordon (Andy Nyman), gets caught in a huge bear trap, it’s just the icing on the grisly cake.

Unlike Eli Roth’s Hostel, Smith and his co-writer James Moran don’t plummet their characters into a scenario that’s just too dumb to really get invested in, and they don’t depict in a run-of-the-mill fashion what’s now become part of the “Splat Pack” (directors obsessed with flashy editing, elaborate torture, and bloodletting/amputations).

In fact, there are many moments that end up being funny, more in the tradition of Peter Jackson’s horror comedies, which come out of the randomness of absurdity. The only drawback, as a genre fan, will be that parts are funnier, more entertainingly deliberate, and scathing than the whole. The film fares much better as a straight horror film with touches of dark comedy as opposed to a satire of defense employees meeting their fates at the hands of psychopathic men with many, many weapons (not just regular machine guns but even a rocket launcher used at a point of hilarious irony, with a passing airplane the unfortunate target.) Jack Gattanella
May 18, 2007