After a short break to complete end-of-term assignments, help other people with exams and rediscover some computer games, I'm back, and to start things up again we have another random offering from my very long Lovefilm list - I Didn't Come Here to Die.
Six 20-somethings are heading out to set up a camp for kids in the middle of nowhere; conveniently without cellphone reception and some considerable distance from civilization. The six of them are your typical horror movie young person fare - that is, by the ten-minute mark you're likely to be feeling some considerable hatred for at least half of them. One of them sneaks some alcohol into the camp for the purposes of an illicit party one night; drunken hijinx ensue, which become drunken arguments, and before you know it someone's lost an eye to a tree branch. What follows after that are a series of blisteringly stupid decisions from our protagonists, who are wielding chainsaws and axes with only the minimum safety precautions taken. In short: these guys are dumb as rocks and most of them are about as likable, and so deserve pretty much everything that happens to them.
I Didn't Come Here to Die is billed as a horror-comedy, but I'm afraid I didn't laugh all that much. Part of the problem is the cast - most of them are average actors at best and so a lot of the lines that I assume were supposed to be the funny ones weren't delivered that way. The six characters as well didn't lend themselves too well to humour - the cliche of the uptight goody-two-shoes who turns into a drunken wild girl was just too predictable, as was the inevitable conflict between her and one of the other girls there; I didn't trust the "nice guy" from the first moment he spoke; and I personally would have taken a chainsaw to the smirking sex-mad guy after half an hour with him, so there was very little humour to be had there either. So really, the only thing left for the "horror-comedy" label is the shadenfreude of watching these characters mess up, suffer and die in unpleasant ways. It's like torture porn without the active torture element.
One of the cast is a good actor, however, and while this makes his complete mental breakdown pretty good and emotional to watch, it also doesn't exactly lend itself to the "comedy" designation; instead it ends up being almost too uncomfortable to watch. Of course there's a twist of sorts at the end, but it's telegraphed from about half an hour in (of a 77-minute movie too) so even that doesn't exactly come as a surprise.
The film's cinematography is a bit of a strange one as well - it has various filters applied to it throughout (and I swear there's some day-for-night - or blue filter for night - shots in there as well) that seem to be there to give it a grindhouse feel, but it's not really needed for a film like this and could well be there to disguise some of the limitations of the filmmakers. At times it feels almost mumblegore, with practically no music unless it's coming from a car radio or smartphone (until the film's climax, when an orchestra suddenly comes out of nowhere), and the feeling that the cameras were limited during the shooting which leads to an almost handheld style of filming.
I can definitely see what they were trying to do with this film - they were aiming for a bleak, pitch-black horror where no-one is spared and also playing on the horror cliche of camp counselors/generic teens going out into the wilderness and getting slaughtered by something, except in this case it's their own ineptitude that's whittling them down rather than some masked psycho. If the characters were more likable (or even more than one-dimensional cliches) then I think the film would have been much closer to this vision (or maybe that's my misanthropy showing through a little). With some better cinematography and some better characters, I can definitely see good things coming from the filmmakers, as they're certainly willing to try new things and originality is something that's always welcome in horror. But for me at least, I Didn't Come Here to Die falls somewhat short of being a must-see film.
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