Pretty Good

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This isnt the worst film that I've ever watched, which is about as high as my praise is going to get.The set-up creates a little bit of tension, and triggers a mild sense of light curiosity, but the main reason i bothered watching to the end was the hope that i would get to see every last one of the awful characters die.There's little that the film does particularly well. There is only one character who i found myself liking at any point, and they're uncerimoniously dispatched without much fuss. The script isnt bad per se, it just seems a bit half-arsed and under developed - which in turn makes the characters fairly half-arsed and under developed.All in all, the sort of film you 'leave on' rather than 'put on'.

Wilderness shows us that just because you're making a film about a bunch of teenagers in the woods getting killed…it doesn't have to suck. There's nothing particularly fancy about this movie, but it's reasonably smart, sufficiently gory, thankfully unpretentious and refreshingly unself-aware .The story concerns a group of boys in a juvenile detention facility in Great Britain. When one of their bunkmates is bullied into committing suicide, the head guard is assigned to take the teen convicts to a remote island for a character building exercise. While on the island, they make two discoveries. One is that a female head guard and two girl convicts are on the island for the same reason as the boys. The second is that someone is out to murder them all. It really is that nakedly formulaic, but these filmmakers take the time and effort to execute the formula as well as they can. The result is a fairly entertaining teen slasher flick. Well, it's really more of a teen skewering flick but if that's what you enjoy, you'll like Wilderness.Now, there's not any more depth to this film than your average kids-getting-killed movie and it's not making any wry observations about the genre or trying to be ironic or anything like that. It just wants to be a nice little horror flick. There's plenty of running and screaming and a few legitimately shocking scenes. There's even some furtive sex, but without any nudity. That's probably the only teen slasher cliché that isn't featured and professionally pulled off.The acid tests for this kind of script is…"How stupid do the characters have to be in order to get killed?" and "How over-the-top ridiculous is the murderer's ability to kill them?" When people who should be running away in fear always stop and look in that dark room or always fall and sprain their ankle fleeing from the killer or when the killer can punch through a wall with his bare hand or get stabbed and shot but just shake it off, those are the signs of a bad script. Wilderness avoids almost all of those flaws, except for an ending where the previously very smart, skilled and tough murderer suddenly become a stupid wuss. Oh, well. Nobody's perfect.Acting-wise, everyone in the cast gives fine performances. Granted, the roles are all broadly and obviously drawn but Stephen Wright and Luke Neal create a believable co-dependent relationship as two bullies and Karly Greene as the girl who comes between them gets to show her character is just as cruel and selfish as the two boys. Sean Pertwee and Alex Reid as the male and female guards also engage in a cute "who's got bigger balls" stare down.If there's any problem with this film it's that the only characters who even remotely resemble good guys are disposed of early on, and the ones that are left are either ciphers you have no reason to care about or bad people who, to some extent, deserve what they're getting. It's also a little odd that the ones who survive are probably the least interesting characters in the story.If you don't like teen slasher films, there's nothing special here to bother with. If you do enjoy that genre and would like to be reminded what good one looks and feels like, go rent Wilderness.

Made in the UK, be sure of that, the slang and the accents are delicious to hear. that's already a big forward. If you aren't regular with slang or cockney than you sure will need your subs. So far the only problem, because this movie digs it all. It starts off with some juvenile delinquents having some trouble with the fagots in their cell. They misuse them and make a big laugh of them. But then one of them kills himself, for punishment they have to go to a abandoned island to learn to work with each other, but they are not alone. Misery starts and suddenly people die. it's a kind of predator, you never see the killer or only in disguise but in a military way. The killings are brutal and very gory. The effects are well done and the atmosphere throughout this flick is depressive. It's nice to see that after the Hammer period England is back on the map with this survival movie. A must see!

A group of juvenile hoodlums overseen by prison guard Jed (Sean Pertwee, "Dog Soldiers") have to fend for there lives after being sent from prison to a secluded island after the death of one of their fellow prisoners. Once there they meet up with a female guard watching over her own female group An unknown person is killing them off one by one (ok perhaps unknown isn't the right word as it's utterly transparent who the killer is) While the movie might be filled with the usual stereotypes (the a-hole, the nerdy guy, the slut, etcetera) , the plot far from original, and the 'mystery' of the killer extremely easy to deduce, it's still a fun enough ride thanks to above adequate acting and some rather nifty bits of gore. And while this film ultimately fails to live up to the immense promise that the director showed as in his superior "Deathwatch", it's still worthy of a watch on a rainy day. Certainly a notch above recent slasher/horror fare.My Grade: C+ DVD Extras:a conversation with Director Michael Bassett (4 minutes, 10 seconds); mini-interviews with 7 members of the cast with a play all option (10 minutes in total); a brief 9 minute on the set featurette; trailer for this film; and trailers for "Journey to the End of Night" & "A Guide to Recognizing your saints"