Wilderness

Released: 18th August 2006

Directed By: Michael J. Bassett

Starring: Sean Pertwee, Alex Reid

Certificate: 15

Reviewed By: Sam Matthews

Continuing my much belated collection of film reviews I decided to inspect 2006 Michael J. Bassett film ‘Wilderness’, a B-movie fan’s wet dream. Wilderness is an abattoir of authenticity. The subtitle ‘Don’t go down to the woods today’ poses a reminiscent of a brownie club’s scary paedophile tale. The story follows a group of juvenile delinquents in an English prison. Two schoolyard bullies, Steve (A bigoted neo-nazi with a face like a hare eating burger sauce from a troth) and Lewis (Steve’s ‘What he said’ right hand man). On the opposing team are two young men, Dave and Danny stricken with anxiety disorders and the mental age of a common housefly. Steve and Lewis ridicule and torment them both but Dave falls to an abrupt end, taking his own life. Suddenly the new kid on the block arrives (Callum, the godly chiselled protagonist) with the intention of ameliorating his life but is accused of stabbing Dave. So they are all deported to a faraway island and

quarantined at a camp where they meet a few girls, form a romance story and get attacked by maniacs before you can say “Right, he’s the one that’ll get fucked first.”

I don’t want to get on the wrong foot with this movie because I actually enjoyed it but to formulate a brilliant horror movie, you need a pristine story board. It needs to join onto the next part without feeling too murky and hastening the introductory scenes and Wilderness feels like the direction is far too swift as if the cast and crew are filming it all at once and whining “Michael, can we just end it here because Pointless is on at half 5.”

However, it did successfully manage to get me on the edge of my seat quavering in anticipation for who would die next as is customary in horror but Wilderness did it with an acceptable degree of intensity. On the other end of the spectrum, there were erratic but purposeless areas such as a ‘romance’ (I use the term loosely) between Lewis and Jo who spent 2 minutes on screen banging like spider monkeys. There was also a mistake that I had spotted whereby a back-up cameraman was lying on the grass in one frame and didn’t appear in the other. And let’s just throw in Callum fondling a dog’s severed head on a rocky crag for licentia poetica.