122

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

One of the great things about horror films is their international scope. There's a mainstream audience for horror from Spain, Mexico, Brazil or South Korea when other genres (political drama, romantic comedy, social commentary) from the same countries are pigeonholed as World Cinema or Arthouse. Horror audiences seem to be more adventurous in that regard and will happily watch something from Indonesia or Turkey, when fans of romantic comedies will usually (not always, but more often) stick to English language and, very occasionally, French.

As a genre fan, I'm always happy to tick another country off the list - I'm still hoping that one day we'll get a werewolf movie or something from Malawi - and this time around it's Egypt. (Frank Agrama's unremarkable Dawn Of The Mummy was an American film.) 122 isn't an outright horror film, but it's a damn good B-thriller that fits into the genre as much as something like Wes Craven's Red Eye does. Nasr, shoe shop assistant and general loser, agrees to one last job as courier for a drug deal so he can afford to marry his (hearing-impaired) girlfriend. But there's a car smash and both of them end up in a strangely underpopulated hospital full of unhelpful nurses and sinister doctors...

For a while 122 (the Egyptian equivalent of 999 in the UK or 911 in the States) looks to be one of those "they're actually dead and don't realise it yet" movies, but it soon becomes clear that they're actually running a criminal scheme in the basement. If you can accept that [1] an allegedly recently built hospital doesn't have a proper mortuary and [2] Nasr can lie on an autopsy table for four hours without any of the doctors noticing that he's not dead, then it's actually quite fun in a runaround kind of way, with a smattering of Die Hard-ish clambering about in lift shafts and treading barefoot on sharp objects. It's not a great movie, but it's a fun and enjoyable one. A recent addition to Netflix.

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