SWEATSHOP

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Yet more gore. Cheap, rough and grimy and absolutely devoid of subtlety, style or sense, Sweatshop (a curious title given that not a single frame of it takes place in a sweatshop) has very little to offer besides tatty sex and extreme gore shots: indeed, it has nothing whatsoever to offer besides tatty sex and extreme gore shots. It has too many potential victims, all of them boring and most of them stupid, but if nothing else it at least doesn't shortchange in the splatter department. Coming straight after the grindingly dull and mean-spirited Truth Or Dare it was a breath of slightly less horrible air and, though I'd be the last person in the world to suggest it's any good at all, I have to be honest and confess that I didn't absolutely hate and detest it. It's grubby and murky and no-one's got two brain cells to rub together, but as a nasty, splattery slasher it's far from the worst offenders.

A group of punks (literal, with the spiky hair and attitude and everything) arrange a rave in an abandoned warehouse. Curiously, despite the place being an absolute mess and only having a few hours to get everything set up, they all seem more interested in drinking, getting laid, wandering off into the darkness and not doing their jobs. Not that it matters: the warehouse is home to a brood of homicidal maniacs led by The Beast, whose signature move is smashing your head in with a massive foundry hammer...

It's tacky, lowest-common-denominator trash (the opening sequence has a naked woman being chased around the darkness in the worst and sleaziest slasher tradition) and as usual it's impossible to care even slightly who lives or dies because they're all dumb as a soup spoon anyway. And much of it is fairly rotten, with ill-advised dancing interspersed with enthusiastic (and, to my eye at least, non-CGI) overkill sequences. There's also no hint of a who or why to the wordless, faceless killers: presumably they were trying for the Texas Chain Saw Massacre vein of unexplained, unfathomable maniacs who had no backstory or motivations, they were just there, but Sweatshop simply isn't in the Texas league. That it's very slightly less abominable than some is really no recommendation: being mostly terrible rather than completely terrible isn't enough for a second star.

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