A good British horror-comedy (Severance (DVD))

Member Name: Burning_Darkness

Product:	Severance (DVD)
Date:	31/10/09 (16 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: funny, light-hearted, good SFX, Tim Mcinnery is good, solid direction

Disadvantages: pretty formulaic

Released in 2006, Severance is a British-made horror comedy in which a group of office workers working for a big defence company specialising in military hardware go on a corporate team-building trip via coach to a remote location in the Hungarian mountains. They end up taking a wrong turn however, and find themselves being mercilessly hunted down and killed one-by-one by a group of deranged and heavily armed Russian war criminals.

The film contains lots of gruesome scenes, with people being hung upside-down and gutted, caught in bear-traps, decapitated, tied to a tree and fried with a flamethrower and so on, but despite the gore it remains at its core a deliberately silly and light-hearted horror, similar in places to Shaun of The Dead and with a decidedly British sense of humour.

The dynamic between the characters is entertaining and the cast's performances are solid, whilst Tim Mcinnery (Percy from Blackadder) gives a particularly amusing perdomance as incompetent and insecure team manager Richard trying desperately to hold everything together. The plot is utterly formulaic but still fun, and there are plenty of enjoyable comedy monets throughout, such as a slapstick routine with a team-member's severed foot and a scene in which the head CEO of the company heroically turns up with a rare prototype weapon but ends up bringing down an overhead passenger plane with it by accident.

The film does a good job of parodying itself and even moves into TROMA territory towards the end, with two heavily endowed Eastern-European women turning up with machineguns and firing away at their foes in slow-motion, their breasts wobbling from the recoil of the guns.

Severance is hardly the funniest or most original horror film out there, but with a decent cast, amusing story and good, over-the-top SFX it remains entertaining throughout and is well worth a watch.

Summary: A entertaining horror-comedy that will appeal to fans of Shaun of the Dead