Carnage Park
Dir: Mickey Keating
2016
**
Mickey Keating’s 2016 horror thriller Carnage Park had so much going for it but it threw it all away. It was wonderfully stylized, like a contemporary Sam Peckinpah movie but with very little meat on the bone. The story is so thin and the visuals – as wonderful as they are – just can’t carry the weight of the idea. It is very much a case of style over substance. It wouldn’t have been half as bad, had the film not promised so much more in its initial flash-back scenes. It built up anticipation with absolutely no pay-off. In 1978, two thieves, "Scorpion Joe" (James Landry Hebert) and Lenny (Michael Villar), escape into the desert with a hostage, Vivian Fontaine (Ashley Bell), after a failed bank robbery. Lenny dies of a gunshot wound suffered during their escape, and Joe forces Vivian to help him dispose of Lenny's body. After a failed escape attempt, Vivian explains that she was at the bank to seek a loan to save her family's farm. As she covertly reaches for a switchblade on the floor of Joe's car, an unseen assailant shoots out one of the car's tires. Joe handcuffs Vivian to the steering wheel and exits the car, boasting that he will kill whoever shot at them. The hidden sniper kills Joe suddenly, then drives up to talk to Vivian. The sniper, Wyatt Moss (Pat Healy), tells her that she is trespassing on private property, and insists he had a legal right to kill Joe. Vivian begs him to free her, but he instead knocks her out with a drug. Wyatt's brother, the sheriff (played by Alan Ruck), visits Wyatt's compound to ask if he has seen Vivian. Wyatt denies any knowledge of her, and his brother warns him that she is too well-known for her murder to be hushed up. When Vivian wakes, she is handcuffed to Joe's corpse in the car. She drags the corpse out of the car and uses a rock to smash the handcuff. Once free, she wanders toward a PA system that has a record player attached. When she plays the album on it, a recording of a siren, Wyatt takes several shots at her. She takes off running, pursued by Wyatt. After avoiding a trapped pit, Vivian finds an apparently dead woman who is holding a shiv. Vivian grabs the weapon, startling the woman into semi-consciousness. As Vivian attempts to revive her, Wyatt shoots and kills the woman. The sheriff discovers Lenny's body and loudly announces that he is entering the compound. While Wyatt is distracted, Vivian surprises him with an attack, takes his rifle from him, and shoots him. Leaving Wyatt for dead with his rifle, Vivian looks for an exit from the fenced-in compound. She follows the cries of a injured man, discovering Travis stuck in a bear trap. Though she frees him, he is unable to move. Travis laments that he is still going to die, as the entire compound is surrounded by miles of electric fencing. Vivian says she believes she has killed Wyatt and promises to return with help. Nearby, she finds a shack that is filled with grisly trophies, such as human ears. Wyatt taunts her on a CB radio, saying he knows she is in the shack, and she hears a gunshot. As Wyatt laughs, she yells at him, drawing the attention of the sheriff, who is investigating the compound. As he enters the shack, Vivian kills him, only to be horrified that it is not Wyatt. Wyatt further taunts her, shooting at her as she attempts to pick up the sheriff's nearby pistol. Once she grabs it, she flees through a trapdoor that leads to a mine shaft. Wyatt chases Vivian through the mine, which contains many dead bodies, dolls, and a PA system that plays distorted music. Vivian hides among the dead bodies, then engages in a shoot-out with Wyatt, which causes a cave-in near him. The lights go out, and Wyatt's taunts her with manic laughter and militaristic rants. Vivian reaches the end of the mine and breaks through a boarded up exit. As she emerges into the daylight, she laughs hysterically. A note says that Vivian escaped to safety, and dozens of bodies were eventually found in the compound; however, Wyatt was never captured. It really sounds like an action-packed film but it really isn’t. Most of the film feels as if you’re just watching Ashley Bell wandering around an arid desert with an orange tint. It is getting to a point where I see the words ‘horror’ and ‘Pat Healy’ together and I become instantly uninterested. Visually it’s beautiful, if not a little cliché, but content-wise there is absolutely nothing of substance. Maybe it is because people getting shot is quite common in film and maybe its because terror cannot be suitably represented in horror when it comes from such a long range, but either way, it fails at being both a scary horror and a compelling thriller.