A bunch of friends (and two sisters) of mixed gender are in the countryside engaging in a friendly game of paintball. Unfortunately, their chosen spot is the favourite hunting grounds of a gang of hardcore bad guys who normally hunt dogs, but decide to target our protagonists instead. Oh yeah, and unlike our would-be war game players, these guys use real guns and real bullets, bringing real death.
I’m guessing Italian writer-director Cosimo Alemà didn’t see “Paintball”, because if he had, he’d know that paintball movies suck, as this 2011 clunker further illustrates. Paintball is basically mock combat, and like playing a war-themed video game, it’s no good as a spectator sport. Watching paintball is the exact opposite of what I call fun, and watching people pretend to play a pretend version of war is even further removed from the concept of fun.
This one comes very dubiously marketed as a ‘true story’, but this is still a nothing film. There’s not even any interesting gore, and the only advantage this has over the risible “Paintball” is that you can at least tell some of the characters apart, uninteresting as they are. Unfortunately, a late scene that is meant to be heart-tugging is rendered inert because one stops giving a crap about anyone or anything in the film after about fifteen minutes. The characters are awful, a big issue I have with modern horror films. Although I’m glad that the characters appear to be in their 30s, the fact is, they’re all unlikeable tools who act younger than they probably are. I also found it hard to see any of the girls in the film being the type to willingly engage in paintball. Truth be told, none of the characters seemed like paintball kinda people. They seem to me like snooty arts students a few years after graduation. I just didn’t buy it and it took me out of the film early, true story or not. That said, the plot set-up is seriously uninspired from the get-go, it feels like something I see in horror films at least once a month these days. And it never ends up being any good (“Wilderness” still stands as the best film of this sort).
About the only thing in this film that I can almost appreciate is that there is some potentially interesting things done with light, which would look wonderful if the video wasn’t so horrible. It’s a better-looking film than “Paintball” perhaps, but the side-effect of going with the cheap option of video filmmaking is that more often than not, the image makes things look like they have been filmed at 4PM. That is certainly the case here, ruining any artistic vision intended to be displayed on screen. By the way, if you simply must see the film, pay attention to the bizarre score composition choices made by the composer, which at no point seem to match what’s going on in the film. Whoever scored this, they’re clearly a big Angelo Badalamenti fan because I was reminded of “Twin Peaks” constantly. I was also distracted by the voices of some of these actors. The villains sound like they are dubbed by the worst video game voiceover artists you’ll ever hear, and I’m certain one of the actresses is dubbed by a dude! It’s probably just a case of poor looping, but until I know that for sure, I still say it sounds like they’ve been dubbed and dubbed badly. Surely no one has weird voices like these people.
OVERALL SUMMARY
I respect low-budget filmmakers for having a go, but if a film is lousy, it’s lousy, and you’re not doing the filmmaker any favours by not calling them on their shoddy work. This is a waste of time, good intentions or not.
