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Severance

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From the liner notes

Working nine to five is a real killer, but teambuilding holidays can sometimes be even worse.

A coach lurches out of the hustle and bustle of Budapest and heads towards the mountainous border. Aboard are seven employees of the international weapons manufacturer Palisade Defence, global suppliers of innovative weaponry for the past 75 war-torn years. The lucky group are being treated to a team-building weekend at the company’s newly built luxury spa lodge by their president, George Cinders.

But things quickly go awry as the colleagues find themselves faced with the chop when their corporate weekend is sabotaged by a deadly enemy. Forget office politics, only the smartest will survive this bloody office outing.

Review

A collection of office stereotypes from multinational munitions company Palisade Defence is on a team-building weekend in Eastern Europe. Their tour bus meets a fallen tree, blocking their progress. The driver, a local, refuses to take an alternate road leading to the same destination. So you know that the tree is no accident and bad things will happen if they take that path. But apparently none of these guys has ever seen a cheesy comedy horror slasher flick before. (Cheesy in a good way.)

They trudge through the Hungarian forest, viewing the circumstances through their own personal filters (middle-management claptrap, toadyism, drug haze, social ineptitude, nascent insanity, corporate conformity and — rarest of the rare — basic common sense). They find a building that they take as the company lodge, but uncover files that evidence its earlier uses: insane asylum, prison, Nazi torture chamber. Their internecine bickering turns to uneasy awareness of the forces around them, as they uncover some buried history about Palisade itself.

Unsurprisingly, these purveyors of sophisticated weapons of mass destruction find themselves on the receiving end of some rudimentary weapons of individual destruction. Methods of execution are varied and inventive, and there’s no shortage of blood. It’s totally derivative and hackneyed, but grudgingly redeemed by some pretty good performances, some clever ideas, some snappy editing and a total lack of pretension. If you can take the gore, Severance can be a guilty pleasure.

But I have to ask: It was a team-building weekend, right? Why didn’t they just join together and move the damned tree?

-- Ann Yarabinee