Pain in the ass

First, let’s get one thing straight: Donkey Punch will probably do very well. Its combination of sun, sex and slaughter will no doubt prove irresistible to the target audience of 18-25 males and Jaime Winstone fans in particular. It’s a pretty unpleasant watch though.

The story centres around three sassy northern gals who are invited onto a yacht by its posh-boy crew members. Very soon, they’re involved in all sorts of sexual shenanigans, culminating in the eponymous donkey punch, which of course goes horribly wrong. And you can probably imagine the rest: lots of running around, screaming and back-stabbing (both literal and metaphorical).

To be fair, its production values are impressive and it belies its reasonably low budget with suitably sparkly photography, decent soundtrack and good performances from a talented up-and-coming cast. Nicola Burley particularly stands out in her subtle performance as Tammi, the most introverted and hence most interesting of the three girls.

The problem is that, as a thriller, it just doesn’t deliver. Although it owes a lot to Philip Noyce’s excellent Dead Calm, it’s really more in the recent “torture porn” tradition of movies like Hostel, relying on increasingly inventive and gory deaths rather than any real intrigue or suspense.

And, when it comes down to it, you just don’t care about the characters. The boys just seem like spoilt brats, (apart from Tom Burke’s obnoxious wide boy thrown in for the sake of variety) and the girls just scream a lot and eventually don’t themselves seem to care whether they get off the boat alive, so why should we?

Don’t get me wrong, they’re perfectly believable as characters, you just wouldn’t want to spend an hour and a half in the company of any of them, even if they weren’t running after you wielding an outboard motor. As such, I found myself completely disinterested, slightly disgusted but most of all desperate for it all to end so I could get outside and enjoy some genuine, rather than cinematic sunshine.