Director: Eros D'Antona
Year: 2017
Country: Italy
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Arriving at a remote location, various strangers gather together to play a bizarre life-or-death game involving the group trying to outlast and survive against a slew of vicious, masked killers hunting them down for a webcam audience, forcing him to partake in the festivities to see his daughter.
Review:
This was a rather enjoyable if somewhat troubled effort. Among the better parts of this one comes from the strong setup that focuses on a somewhat clever way to go about retelling a genuinely formulaic central storyline. With the first half focused on setting up the one guy as having the most motivation to win the game by trying to use the money to win back his daughter from her abusive mother and uncaring new boyfriend, the prospect of joining the seemingly random game, which has so many red flags that it’s hard to respond to unless the type of money were offered. The whole idea of this format to turn the film into a series of encounters where hapless victims are held inside the abandoned building and hunted down by masked maniacs for the sake of a community audience watching over webcams gives this a series of brutal, close-quarter encounters featuring the solid stalking and ambush scenes of the nameless killers going around taking out the rest of the group as they try to make it out alive.
Outside of this, there’s not a whole lot to the film. It’s pretty repetitive in how it plays out, with the dwindling group running around the compound trying not to come across one of the hunters and then losing a fight when they inevitably occur, leaving the other survivors to regroup until the next encounter. It's fairly simple-minded and doesn’t have all that much going for it since the one throughline in the film is the father’s need to survive and reunite with his daughter since the others are just useless cannon fodder designed to be knocked off and not that important, and the attempts to introduce a secondary storyline involving the recruiter getting thrown into the mess as well doesn’t have the kind of impact due to the whole thing being a thread of his motivations for doing it. This leaves the film with a generally lackluster feeling, with the one-note approach not offering much deviation at all, and when combined with the low-budget approach, here is what is holding this one down.
Overview: **.5/5
A solid if generally one-note genre effort, there’s not a whole lot on display here beyond a few solid encounters with the killers that soon delves into a repetitive manner anyway, keeping this one somewhat disappointing. Viewers with an interest in this style or approach will have the most to like here, while most others out there should heed caution.
This review is part of our ongoing series of reviews for Italian Horror Month, every November on the site:
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