We hear constantly that the British film industry is in crisis. Directors, producers and screenwriters, we are told, need to fight tooth and nail to get their projects on the big screen. We must, therefore, make every effort to support the domestic industry.
Watching Craig Strachan's bog-awful 'Wild Country' isn't just enough to make you lose faith in the judgement of British producers in allowing it to be made, it's likely to sap you of the will to live.
It truly is dire. The performances are wooden, the 'scary monsters' (allegedly werewolves, but more akin to giant moles wearing giant plastic Hallowe'en masks) feeble and unfrightening, the script tired, formulaic and hysterical in every way but the right one (it's not even preposterously histrionic enough to amuse, it's just a bad bad movie), the characters (if the term could be applied loosely enough to describe them) bland to the point of indistinguishability. Even the normally watchable Peter Capaldi is fairly awful.
I challenge anyone watching this rustic ruminance not to laugh out loud at the supposedly terrifying final 'shock'.
Awful. Unremittingly, irredeemably awful.
It could, of course, be a sophisticated ploy to encourage the Chav population to venture into the wild woods and be slaughtered, thus reducing the surplus delinquent population. That, I fear, credits those responsible with far too much subtlety.
As werewolf movies go, this makes 'Cursed' look like Shakespeare.
