{"id":194,"date":"2008-06-09T10:35:38","date_gmt":"2008-06-09T10:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattblake.wordpress.com\/?p=194"},"modified":"2008-07-03T11:56:18","modified_gmt":"2008-07-03T11:56:18","slug":"wild-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/reviews\/wild-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Wild<\/a>Wild Country <\/strong>is a low budget Scottish horror film – costing approximately \u00a31 million – filmed in the late Autumn of 2004. It had a limited release in the UK and played at assorted film festivals around the world so, despite it’s limitations, it has to be hoped that it managed to turn a bit of a profit, especially in the video market.<\/p>\n

The story is reminiscent of several bigger, better films: An American Werewolf in London<\/strong>, obviously, but also more recent productions such as Micheal Bassett’s Wilderness <\/strong>& Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers<\/strong>. A small group of troubled Glaswegian teenagers are taken to the middle of the Scottish moors and left to orienteer their way to a rendezvous point the next day. Unfortunately, they manage to get lost, and promptly run into a particularly nasty pair of werewolves, which pick them off one by one.<\/p>\n

That’s about it, really. It’s a slim narrative that’s fleshed out by some semi-decent characterisation. Most of the young actors were non-professionals, and there’s a certain realistic, Ken Loach style feel to their interaction. The protagonist, Kelly Ann, is a young girl who has just been encouraged to give her child up for adoption; Lee (Martin Comptson, the most experienced of the younger performers having working on films like Red Road<\/strong>, Sweet Sixteen<\/strong> and Doomsday<\/strong>) is the ducking-and-diving father who’s honest enough to realise that he couldn’t cope with parenthood; David & Mark (Kevin and Jaimie Quinn) a pair of authentically bickering brothers; Louise (Nicola Muldoon) a chavette. Considering their inexperience and age, all of these performers do a decent enough job, without ever really convincing (for a comparison, watch Tony Kebbell – a truly powerful young actor – in Wilderness<\/strong>).<\/p>\n

And that’s one of the films problems. Led as it is by the youngsters, it feels rather like one of those old Childrens Film Foundation features. It has a similar restriced running time (66 minutes); variable pacing, shakey production values, plot illogicalities and hokey effects (created by Bob Keen, who also worked on the superior Isolation <\/strong>at around the same time). And, despite the additional gore, it’s hard to imagine it appealing to anybody who isn’t the same age as its characters.<\/p>\n

In it’s favour, it does have a winning performance from Peter Capaldi as a shallow trendy vicar and the scenery is absolutely stunning. But, despite Wild Country<\/strong> being an admirable attempt at merging British realism with horror; it doesn’t really work, leaving it feeling insubstantial and rather amateurish. I’ve seen worse, and at least it’s short enough to prevent it from becoming dull, but it’s not one I can highly recommend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wild Country is a low budget Scottish horror film – costing approximately \u00a31 million – filmed in the late Autumn of 2004. It had a limited release in the UK and played at assorted film festivals around the world so, despite it’s limitations, it has to be hoped that it managed to turn a bit of a profit, especially in the video market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[242],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}