A WARNING TO THE FAINT OF HEART: This film opens with a jump scare, and a mighty effective one at that. Not many horror films have the sheer balls to set the tone like that, but this one does. By the time you see it, it’ll probably have some studio logos at the front, but my screener copy didn’t even have that, so you can imagine my shock less than a second after pressing play.
Shaken and impressed, I looked forward to the rest of South African psychedelic horror Rage, but it delivered only intermittently on its promise. We’re introduced to the horror-film standard group of reckless, horny teenagers prepared to enjoy a weekend away at someone-or-other’s isolated cabin, with plenty of booze and drugs to see them through the weekend. The characters in these films never seem to worry much about packing food, loo roll, sunscreen, or other essentials for these breaks, just booze and drugs and condoms, though even that last item is frequently forgotten.
In any case, their trip is rudely interrupted by a rather peculiar, much older feller with a thick Afrikaans accent, who claims he used to live in the house and asks to use the toilet. He ends up having to fix this very toilet, for it was previously blocked up by one of our lovely, yet gastrointestinally distressed, characters. A lot of brown water flows in this film, though it doesn’t compare with such titans as Triangle of Sadness or Not Another Teen Movie. Anyway, after that he latches on to the group and some fairly well-handled class, racial and generational dynamics are exposed. Time was, you could just have your young people offed by a mysterious zombie or ghost pædophile and that was that, but nowadays it’s the done thing to seriously interrogate social dynamics first, then you can get the raping and limb-chopping underway.
Sadly, as is often the case in these films, director Jaco Bouwer doesn’t really know how to keep the tension going once the violence begins. He’s previously shown good form in the genre with Gaia, but that was horror of a very different sort; a supernatural, creeping dread type of picture with little explicit “action”. Here, he proves himself adept at beautiful establishing shots, and coaxing out good performances, particularly from Carel Nel as the creepy Albert, and Nicole Fortuin, hopefully a future star, as the protagonist, but not so much at chasing and slashing.
★★☆☆☆