Oh no, no, no, no no no. NO. Four stars? Empire, Glamour and Arena hang your collective heads in shame. This film is Swiss cheese, potent fromage pure and simple.
That’s right, you guessed it, Donkey Punch is full of holes and it stinks.
For a start there’s the title. Has to be the worst name ever for a movie not involving a jazz soundtrack and nubile pleasure-seeking nymphets.
Basically the plot involves three girls heading for a weekend in Mallorca, joining four lads on a stolen yacht, doing some drugs, having some sex and murdering strangers.
Right from the off the cringey dialogue doesn’t allow you to spare one scrap of concern for the flat-pack, assemble in genre characters.
Worse than that, the film seems hopelessly lost between being a dramatic thriller a la Hitchcock and a knowing self-referential horror thriller like Saw or Hostel.
The writing is littered with ‘youngisms’ that characterise the vain attempts of men to re-capture their youth on celluloid, and of inexperienced actors trying to ‘be natural.’
Director Olly Blackburn shoots the action in a series of familiar, uninspiring mid-shots mostly in deep focus, rarely pulling our attention this way or that like a good thriller should.
In an unforeseen comic twist, the most realistic thing about the film is the unusually graphic ten-minute sex scene that sets up the film’s narrative apex.
Josh, who we are supposed to recognise as the ‘inexperienced one’ because he’s reluctant to take ecstasy, donkey punches one of the girls mid coitus, snapping her neck.
Read that sentence back to yourself. How ridiculous does that sound?
Sorry, but unless this kid’s been training with Bruce Lee at Ike Turner’s House of Pain, his scrawny chicken arms couldn’t break wind never mind vertebrae.
What ensues is hysterical soft-core slasher action in which you can almost hear Blackburn shouting “There isn’t time, just say whatever.”
The plot unravels rather than develops, with yawning chasms that will perturb all but the most lobotomised viewers.
Gordon Ramsay is right, the only way to enjoy strong cheese is with a good whine.
[story by Tom Henry]
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What next? –
Tony Scott and Michael Bay co-direct “Two Girls One Cup of Dirty Sanchez” – a film where Will Smith Dirty Sanchez’s his missus (who unbeknown to him happens to be in the CIA), gives her a faeces-borne disease and she dies so he then goes on the run from the Feds, Enemy-of-the-State style-ee, while, culminating in a Will Smith vs Rachel Weisz fight it out on top of a moving jet plane in a Two-Girls-One-Cup-style orgy of vomit and shit?
Still, it would be better than Bad Boys 2.