Review by Tristan Bishop
Any publicity is good publicity, so the saying goes, and Young, High and Dead certainly announced itself in an unusual way, catching the attention for all the wrong reasons. A few months back a press release and trailer surfaced, with the director taking great pains to tell us that one of the main characters gets raped in the film. Seriously. It gets mentioned three times in the space of a few sentences, with the director even stating ‘…the trailer, in which I fake rape (the actress in question).’ Troubling, to say the least, and not helped remotely by the accompanying rhetoric about how the director is ‘from the wrong side of the tracks’, and that the film ‘is not what the scene wants or needs, but at least it’s different’. So, just to recap, the director has a massive chip on his shoulder over his background, is worryingly obsessed with the rape of one of the actresses, and freely admits that his film is likely of no interest to the horror crowd. Somebody get this guy a job in marketing!
My colleagues at BAH were, it turns out, rather put off the film by this press release, because they are (by-and-large) sensible types who don’t suffer from some form of cinematic masochism, but yours truly is labouring under the idea that watching all the crap that no-one else will touch with a bargepole is actually performing a useful public service.
Young, High and Dead (not a bad title, it must be said; it certainly fires the imagination) starts with five young people making their way to a camping trip in the woods, fuelled by a toolbox full of drugs. The three guys are varying degrees of dickbag, and the girls are pretty and not given a hell of a lot of characterisation (this is a shame, as one of them is Hannah Tointon, who impressed in the excellent The Children in 2008). So far, so standard. This takes up the first half hour of the film, but is intercut with (thankfully implied) scenes of a man mutilating an imprisoned little girl. The next half hour is taken up entirely with the characters sitting around a campfire, taking enough drugs to make Tony Montana and Cheech Marin blush, and the cracks in their relationships appearing as they get more wasted and paranoid. Of course, in the final third the child-killer appears and mayhem ensues, but, to be honest, I’ll be extremely impressed if you last that long.
I’ll go through the good points of the film first, in the interests of balance. The animated intro is quirky and surprising, and there is a post-credits scene at the end which ties into an earlier situation and made me chuckle. Unfortunately what is sandwiched between these short moments is 90 minutes of utter tedium. The film has a turgid pace, no build-up (in fact the intercutting at the start serves only to confuse, let alone slightly nauseate), detestable characters, and a lo-fi handheld camera style that serves to make it look both cheap, and like a found footage film. Add to this mix some woeful editing during a silly climax and you’re left with something a little way from entertaining.
As for the much-trumpeted (by the director at least) rape scene, well, it is at least thankfully non-explicit, and the director is obviously attempting to make us ‘complicit’ in the act by it being filmed in extreme close-up POV, but it serves no purpose in the story at all, and, with a film this badly-made, any emotional impact is going to be negligible anyway. In fact, the biggest shock in the film is in the opening credits, which tell us that, although Luke Brady is credited as director and writer, there are an additional FOUR people credited as ‘co-director’. I have no idea what a ‘co-director’ is, but having four of the buggers certainly didn’t help matters here.
Young, High and Dead isn’t the worst British horror film ever made (I can’t imagine I’ll ever see something as pointless and appalling as Black Shuck again in my life), but I’d place it very near the bottom of the pile. Still, apparently someone likes it, as the second (much less worrying, although still banging on about ‘being from the gutter’) press release mentions a sequel on the horizon, a proposition which even a bad film-loving masochist like myself would balk at.
Young, High & Dead is available to watch on demand in the UK here. It will be released to VOD in the US at Halloween.
(Note: director Luke Brady has responded to the criticism of his press release.)