Severance

If you were to cross Saw with “The Office” you might get something along the lines of Severance, an intermittently funny and entertaining horror-comedy mash up. I wanted to like this movie a lot more than I did, but in the end, the gags are just way too silly, the characters are too generic, and the plot is something of a vague corporate satire that serves no real purpose. The basic premise focuses on a group of corporate schlubs from a weapons company called Palisade on a “team building” retreat somewhere in Hungary. Their bus gets intercepted and they end up crashing at an abandoned nearby lodge where they eventually find themselves getting picked off one by one by what company mythology tells them is a war criminal that escaped from a facility years ago to seek vengeance on Palisade for providing the weaponry that was used against him. It’s a hard to explain concept, but it barely matters. The film has limited concern with narrative coherence. It’s mostly an excuse to photograph a series of bloody, sometimes comedic deaths that are often more icky than scary. In the wake of brutal films like Saw and Hostel, the violence here probably seems tame, but it’s also indicative of a weird compliance that dooms the film. It’s partly a horror movie send up that toys with clichés and convenient devices, but by its end it feels like it has simply become one of the movies it mocks. Save for the pervasive snarky wit, it has become pure formula by the time it reaches its final act.

Unlike films such as Shaun of the Dead which pulled off the difficult feat of being both a parody and a genre compatriot without implicating itself in the crimes of its comrades, this movie feels like a sloppy, sillier version of all the rest. Imagine jokes about self-righteous smirking post-decapitation, rocket launchers that don’t quite work right, prostitutes stripping down to form a chain of clothing long enough to climb out of the ditch that has trapped them. Laura Harris plays Maggie, the typical female character that everyone secretly lusts after. Danny Dyer is Steve, the typical stoner lothario. Almost every other character is a typical horror movie stock persona as well and the film never does enough to make them any more interesting than that. It’s a funny film, a perfectly goofy assortment of pratfalls and weaponry jokes. I still think the film had much bigger intentions than that, though. It could have been a smart, sharp spoof on both horror movies and cutthroat international corporations, but instead it’s just a mixed bag of hit or miss jokes with some mildly spooky figures lurking in shadows.

Grade: C+