A LONELY PLACE TO DIE (2011)
A Lonely Place To Die is more thriller then horror movie but, it is a suspenseful and sometimes nasty little thriller at that and does have the violence, tone and body count one might expect from a horror flick. The film tells the tale of a group of friends… Alison (Melissa George), Rob (Alec Newman), Jenny (Kate Magowan), Ed (Ed Speleers) and Alex (Garry Sweeney)… who are mountain climbing in the Scottish Highlands and find a young Croatian girl, Anna (Holly Boyd), buried in a box in the middle of nowhere. They obviously release her and take her with them but, to say that some very unsavory and very lethal individuals want her back, is an understatement and the vacation turns into a fight for survival against two ruthless and armed thugs. What makes this thriller especially effective though, is it’s ability to smoothly change gears. What starts out as a wilderness survival flick becomes something else about halfway through and without missing a beat. It actually draws us in further, as we didn’t expect the movie to take this direction. The less you know the better, so, I’ll say no more. Director and co-writer Julian Gilbey (along with co-writer Will Gilbey) evolves the story without loosing our attention or breaking the tension he creates early on, giving us something more then we expected, so, we are glued to the screen until the film’s bloody and very intense conclusion. He gives us a few surprises along the way and keeps us from ever getting comfortable in our expectations of where this is all going to lead. Performances all around are good with Melissa George playing a strong yet vulnerable heroine and Sean Harris and Gary Sweeney are brutally effective as the pair of cold and vicious kidnappers. The Scottish locations give the film a nice look under the guidance of Julian Gilbey’s lens and he gives the film a nice no-frills yet visually striking style while providing us with some intense action and suspense. A very entertaining action/thriller and a sign of hopefully more good things to come from Julian Gilbey. Also stars Hellboy’s Karel Roden.
3 and 1/2 bullets!
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