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A group of freshmen (and especially freshwomen) go on an organized trip
to God-knows-where, when a mysterious guide leads thenm right into the
middle of a vast forest and makes sure their bus has a horrible crash - in
a rather inspired scene in which a wooden bridge breaks under the bus's
weight. Not all of the teens make it out alive, but those who do
desperatelöy try to walk back to civilisation - while some of them are
met by horrible accidents (?) while others are clearly bumped off by one
or more assailants. Eventually, the youngsters make it to an abandoned
industrial complex that also includes a brightly lit and fully stocked
supermarket - and here the killers, whoever they are, have a field day,
picking the teens out one by one and murdering them in an increasingly
gruesome manner. The only one who seems capable of fighting back is feisty
Mew (Amornpan Kongtrakarn), but for her efforts, she is met with an
especially violent fate, being sliced apart by a portable circular saw. Almost
against all odds, four of the teens manage to steal a car and make it out
of the forest alive in a violent chase that ends in a crash. They awake in
a hospital - but the hospital, which is covered in bloodstains, might not
be all that much of a safe haven ... which is when a TV host asks the
audience to vote per text message who should be bumped off next, as all
that was happening was obviously just part of a TV reality gameshow, in
which the contestants, our teens, play for their lives ... A
very well-made slasher: It's unusually atmospheric, inspired in its
methods of killing people, it features several impressive setpieces (first
and foremost the schoolbus crash), it's well-paced and the gore scenes are
competently handled. That said, the film is not immune to the shortcomings
of the slasher genre: It's characters hardly rise above cardboard level
and are completely interchangeable, and the film seems to be awfully
deliberate in who to kill and who to leave alive - but this is where the
endking, that at first seems a little tagged on, makes actual sense: While
the TV-crew couldn't care less about the contestants and the host
complains about his bad lines, the fate of the boys and girls is entirely
left in the hands of a teen and pre-teen audience (everyone who's old
enough to text-message actually) - which puts a bitter but highly ironic
twist on the previous goings-on, actually. Not without its shortcomings,
but totally watchable - and pretty exciting, actually.
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