>>REVIEW
SEVERANCE
STARRING Laura Harris, Toby Stephens and Danny Dyer
DIRECTED BY Christopher Smith
Opens Friday, June 1
Uptown Screen
When a character in a horror movie tells a seemingly pointless story about the freshly guillotined Marie Antoinette’s severed head watching her neck stump bleed, it is a safe bet there is going to be a pretty sweet decapitation scene later in the movie. When a story like this is told in a horror film that also has a cheeky sense of humour, you are guaranteed one of the funniest death scenes ever.
Director Christopher Smith’s latest offering finally embraces what horror audiences have known for a long time, humour makes horror better. Severance is what would happen if you took the cast from The Office and dropped them in the middle of Deliverance. Like Scream, Severance’s main objective is to first and foremost be entertaining, something horror purists may scoff at, but the film also manages to be gory and terrifying.
Following a group of co-workers from a multi-national weapons manufacturer on a team-building trip to the company’s luxury chateau in the woods of Hungary, things get scary when the road to the chateau is blocked. They are forced to hike through the woods to the lodge. Once there, the group discovers all is not right, and when things start going bump in the night, you can bet that their careers in weapons manufacturing are going to produce some wickedly ironic gore. The chateau is booby-trapped and co-workers get picked off one by one. The death scenes follow all the best horror formulas and offer up more than a few horrific surprises.
The laughs are hysterical (including one delirious scene involving a severed leg and a fridge), but the horror is also gruesome enough to keep true horror fans placated. Adding more weight to the film is its superb cast of characters. Canadian Laura Harris as the horror heroine Maggie and Danny Dyer as the slacker Steve stand out amidst a sea of talent. Yes, they all embody a horror cliché (the pretty heroine, the too-smart-for-his-own-good loser, the druggie slacker), but they embody the clichés so well that they become believable. |
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