A Stiff Upper Lip

Severance is a British film that sort of does for slasher movies what Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz did for (respectively) zombies and zombie-like Michael Bay cops. It was funny and enjoyable, but not as good as it could have been. After the opening murder, we flash back to meet the sales team of Palisade Defence. They are on their way to a corporate retreat/team building weekend. Things go quickly awry and the team ends up in the wrong spot, squarely in the sights of a murderous psychopath.

The film is efficient and rather cheerful about the necessary beats of a modern bucket o' blood movie. It also aims to point out the stupidity and silliness of much modern business lingo. "You can call yourself a warrior all you want around the table in the conference room," Severance says, "but when you're staring down a maniac with a hatchet, well, try not to soil yourself." The movie stars Laura Harris (whom I first noticed in one of my favorite bad movies, The Faculty) and Tim McInnerny (MI-5 and Blackadder) and about a half-dozen actors who are vaguely familiar from various BBC America projects. The film is pretty successful as both comedy and slasher movie, but one character mistake keeps it from being the satire of corporate "warfare" to which it aspires.

That mistake is Richard's (McInnerny) complete incompetence. The movie would have been much stronger in the social commentary department if Richard had actually been a strong, successful leader, someone who really believed in those "business is war" homilies and applied them ruthlessly. The contrast between the blowhard puffery of corporate Big Swinging Dicks and the actual reality of "nature red, in tooth and claw" would have been much more effective. Instead, Richard is almost a cliche of a spineless ditherer. There's no way he would have climbed the ladder in an industry like defense, where the cloying stink of faux-testosterone hangs in the air like musk.

Still, the movie is several notches above the average horror film, and it actually provides a motivation for its killer. It's so much better than Hostel (1 or 2), Turistas, or High Tension that I almost feel bad for pointing out its flaws.