Carnage Park (2016)

 After watching Mickey Keating's Offseason I decided to check out more of his work, so I watched Carnage Park.  I'm glad to report it is another win - a slick micro-budget thriller centred on brilliant performances by Ashely Bell as the hapless victim of terrible misfortune, and the genius of sound designer Sean Duffy.  Keating helps out a bit as well.

Vivian is not having a good day.

First, the obvious criticism - this is nothing original.  A bank heist goes wrong and two hoodlums try to escape with a hapless woman - wrong place at the wrong time, lady! - in the truck.  Their flight to Mexico is cut short when they blunder into a cheerful local psychopath's devil's playground.

Thus far, we could be watching any number of cheap and cheerless Tarantino or Rodriguez knock offs.  Keating signals his influences cheerfully - there are about half a dozen references or borrowings from Reservoir Dogs and From Dusk Till Dawn in the two sentences above, and Keating throws in a 'Mr Orange bleeding out in the back of a car' intro and a rather familiar ear cutting scene for good measure.

"Scorpion?  I think I seen this film before.  I don't think I'm gonna make it."

So it's pastiche, but it is adroitly done and directed with pace and flair.  But where it comes into its own and starts to develop some interesting characteristics of its own is once the luckless Vivian (that's the broad in the truck) finds herself as the only survivor of the initial trio, staggering across a bleak landscape with a killer on her tail.

'Chick being hunted by a killer' is, of course, the fundamental premise of ... oh, almost every horror film ever made.  The focus on a female protagonist / target raises questions around voyeurism and misogyny in addition to the fundamental sociopathy if the The Most Dangerous Game formula.  Those questions are most succinctly distilled in the dubious apex of the genre, Naked Fear, in which a naked stripper is hunted across the desert.  You can't make it more basic than that, can you?  Please, don't try ...

Sexual exploitation underpins much of the genre, and which is often clearly not limited to the fictional hunters but is clearly motivating director and audience as well.  For the hunters in those films, the link between sexual impotence and the violence they aim at women is fairly obvious - all those phallic guns and knives are a bit of a give away - but for the audience the questions about why they are getting off on watching an attractive, terrified and scantily clad woman being chanced by violent men tend not to be addressed.

Thankfully, Keating eschews this tawdry tendency, delivering a crisp film which - once the hunt commences - proceeds swiftly and efficiently through the essential familiar plot points.  But Ashley Bell's performance as Vivian elevates what might otherwise have been a forgettable - or ignorable - genre piece.  She's superb.  Her facial expressions and body language seem mannered but this creates the irresistible idea we are watching a particularly horrible film from the 1920s - as if Chaplin or Keaton had been given free rein to make a brutal, violent thriller in the silent era.

Toto?  That you shootin' at me?

(I can't help but wonder if the whole thing came about during a drunken bullshit session when Keating was challenged to come up with a film combining elements of The Wizard of Oz and The Hills Have Eyes.)

Being given a decent character to play helps - after watching Offseason, strong female roles seem to be a trademark.  Right from the start, Vivian is tough and resourceful, responding to the upending of her world with gritty determination, rather than wailing and gnashing her teeth.  A farmer's daughter used to hardscrabble, she doesn't waste time but sets about surviving.

We should also acknowledge Pat Healy as Wyatt, the hunter.  Being scarily convincing as someone utterly evil isn't exactly the sort of role likely to win many fans or lead to great career paths - though he does have a role in Scorcese's upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon, and was in Station 19 as well, which is good to learn.

"Y'alright in there, Miss?  Well, I reckon I can fix it so you ain't"

Most good horror films have always used sound effectively.  Desperate screams, the sound of knives sawing trough bodies, and silence before violence is the most obvious examples.  In part it is a practical response to not being able to show some things (those fuddy-duddy censors!) but it also works on audience imagination as we supply the visuals hinted at by the squelching and ripping noises.  In Carnage Park (as in Offseason) sound is used very skillfully.  Again, nothing terribly new or innovative - Wyatt plays creepy sound effects throughout his domain but this is a fairly shameless pretext to freak us out as well.  And it works because Keating and sound designer Sean Duffy avoid obvious big bangs and screams for more unusual and unsettling aural fare.  It's a film worth listening to as well as watching.

Further nods to the cinematography.  Colour is leeched out of the landscapes to leave us with fifty shades of dust.  This reinforces the impression we're watching a film a black and white era film.  Keating's love of intertitles - which I salute - adds to this impression.  Bleak and almost monochrome, it still looks stunning - an arid but evocative wilderness where you can imagine men with heads full of delusions and bad thoughts going crazy and letting their demons come out to play.

Star Rating: ***