SCATHING

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND WHATEVER

More cheap slasher junk. There's not much you need to know about Scathing except that it's nasty, it's stupid, it makes not a shred of sense, it has a twist ending that also makes not a shred of sense, it's indifferently done and your life will not be even imperceptibly enriched by seeing it.

The basic thrust is that a young woman sneaks out late at night to be with her thicko boyfriend who, rather than take her to a club, a cinema or a restaurant like normal people would do, takes her to the back yard of an abandoned house, where they wander round for a bit looking in the barns. But in the morning the car won't start and when their friends arrive to help them, a masked maniac looms out of the barns and kills them, leaving the first couple apparently trapped in their car for three straight days without food, water or toilet facilities...Told in flashback during a police interview, it pulls a ludicrous twist in its last act by suggesting that everything up to that point had been complete manure and that our apparent heroine was actually the killer, despite the fact that two of the victims were big hunky blokes and she's one of those skinny petite types. (Also, if this is a police interview, why is she telling them her dream sequences?)

With its poor acting, gibberish plot and occasional bits of torture and gore (and strong hints of cannibalism), it does have the feel of backyard slasher junk of decades past, to the extent that it  might even bring back a little twinge of nostalgia for the video nasty era. Forty years ago this would definitely have been seized and would thus have earned itself a measure of must-see attention it simply doesn't warrant. These days it doesn't even have that. The more I think about it (which is not a good idea) the more I realise that even the blood and screaming was insufficient reward for stodging through the rest of it. It's worse than I remember, and I only saw it on Saturday.

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