The day after a night of heavy partying, four friends - Sarah (Maddie
Moate), Jake (David Drew), Martin (John Doughty) and Dave (Paul Tonkin) -
decide to go on a camping trip to somewhere in the middle of nowhere - an
experience that is somehow marred early on when they find a corpse on
exactly the spot they have put up their tents ... and it's too dark to
find their way back home through the woods. Later the corpse has
vanished, then Sarah is attacked and injured by a psycho, who seems to
have come out of nowhere, Dave - the one with medical knowledge - is
somehow seperated from the group, Jake gets his eyes poked out, and Martin
is eventually revealed to be the killer of the piece - until he's found
horribly murdered. So - and you have to pardon my French - what the fuck
is going on? And why are there suddenly two Sarahs, one good and one evil?
And what has this undercover cop (Andy Callaghan) to do with all of this?
And why does Sarah start to have visions she's somewhere completely else? Suffice
to say, the answer is even worse than what our four heroes to endure on
their innocent "camping trip" ... One thing up front:
The Hounds is not a perfect film - it features quite a few too many
subplots that lead into nowhere, unnecessary characters, and its set-up is
too elaborate for the story that follows ... but once the film picks up
steam (which is soon enough), it's pretty unrelenting - and it profits
vastly from the fact than it's not just one more piece of survival horror
(which the setup might suggest) but has another dimension attached to it
that adds both atmosphere and genuine tension to the story at hand. Well,
prepare to get creeped out I guess ...
|