BREAK ** Germany 2008 Dir: Matthias Olof Eich 87 mins
Despite the novelty of being a German movie set in Canada with a distracting range of accents and English line delivery, this is another generic, post-WRONG TURN, sub-DELIVERANCE backwoods bloodbath. Four oddly unappealing young women on a break in a woodsy rural retreat are harassed, stripped, raped and mutilated by a pair of in-bred, grinning mountain men with bad teeth.
These brutish antagonists, sadly, never seem all that menacing, largely because the script gives them awkward one-liners (“What ze hell is wrong with you people, I don’t have the whole day here!”), kiss-off lines (“Game over!”) and even embarrassing movie references (“You talkin’ to me?!”). The over-familiarity makes for a fairly interminable first half that has too many jauntily scored montages of the girls having fun. Later there’s nudity, lots of efficient throat-slashing cheap gore…and an annoying black chick who photographs everything and ends up getting an arrow through her eye. This underwhelming flick was cut by 53 seconds for its UK release to remove nudity from its scenes of sexual violence.
Review by Steven West