 A FilmExposed Film Review |
 Dir: Kit Ryan, (2007), UK/U.S.A./Ireland, 91 mins
Cast: Stephen Dorff, Jaime Murray, Jamie Foreman, Geoff Bell
Early Peter Jackson films such as Bad Taste (1987) and Brain Dead (1992), along with Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy and even the Reanimator (1985) films are a golden era for low budget horror laugh fests. These films transcended their budget with some of most well-timed and funny bludgeoning scenes committed celluloid. The heavy irony of the nineties films such as Scream, though witty in places, almost effectively killed the genre because Wes Craven et al could only send up horror’s genre conventions in a fashion, which seemed well, smug and obvious after a while. But films like SEVERANCE (2006) and Shaun of the Dead (2004) have reinvigorated horror comedy and brought whole slue of new titles.
Botched is a low budget film that ploughs the same territory as the fore-mentioned British films and those eighties classics, but with a stunning lack of success. Stephen Dorff plays Ritchie Donovan, a professional thief whose is the only survivor of a heist gone bad. Forced to take make up for the failure, he is sent to Russia to steal a priceless antique cross locked in a safe on the penthouse floor of a Moscow skyscraper. In their escape, Ritchie and his Russian accomplices are forced to take hostages and refuge on the unused 13th floor. Cringe inducing wackiness ensues.
What Botched delivers is an hour and a half of numerous chase scenes reminiscent of a Benny Hill sketch set to cliché Russian polka music around a cheap looking set, obvious fake and grating stereotypical Russian accents that border on racist, acting that would fail an audition for a primary school play and a man in a Viking costume running around shouting repeatedly. All of which are repeated ad nauseam. The attempt at slapstick humour is more annoying than funny. Funny walks, someone almost getting knifed in the crotch and disco lights during a death scene, all equate to a similar comedic timing of the Scary Movie franchise at its worst: throw in something completely random and out of place – that’ll get a laugh.
The stock characters don’t help either. Boris, a cowardly security guard who happens to be one of the hostages, keeps repeating, “I am Boris, I am alpha male,” as though repetition will make the line funny. The psychotic brother and sister into ritual killing, the hot one dimensional love interest, the bully older brother and his meek, weird younger sibling and even Dorff’s turn as the veteran criminal on one last job before going straight, are all clichéd.
Botched doesn’t just look like a student film; it has all the amateur flaws of one too. It is a film that has all the smugness of those nineties films, though none of their wit, and the budget of eighties classics, yet none of their originality or well-timed humour. Moronic, unfunny and boringly repetitive, even as a popcorn flick it fails. Revisit those early Jackson films instead, as the title of this film in fact relates to its quality. |
