Three
young British woman on vacation (excuse me, holiday) in Spain come
across a bunch of good-looking men while partying and drinking
champagne at various establishments, and are soon wisked away to
continue the festivities on the men’s boat. After drinking and swimming
in the ocean and talking for an eternity, things pick up when they all
pop pills and start having sex.
One guy, spurred on by previous talk of various gnarly sex acts (Dirty Sanchezes and such), goes a
little overboard and donkey punches the girl he’s banging. Her neck
shatters and she dies instantly. If that’s not a way to kill your hard-on, I don’t know what is. Now everyone’s freaking out about customs and
how to avoid crap from the Spanish police and both groups fight over
what to do with the body. The girl’s friends are kept in the dark about
what happened, but the guys were shooting video of the sex act.
Naturally, things don’t end well.
The beginning of the film is reminiscent of Cloverfield or The Ruins,
of all films. It starts off as a relatively normal story where a group
of overpriveledged twats meet and party, and all the while you’re
waiting for the shoe to drop- the movie isn’t called Donkey Punch for no reason, after all.
Except, instead of, say, Cloverfield, which at least tries to introduce you
to these characters and make you like them and know what makes them tick, we’re just shown these
relatively worthless individuals who are just trying to get drunk and
get laid. A noble quest, to be sure, but it’s a lot less interesting
when you’re not involved personally.
40 minutes of this goes by before anything happens. 40 minutes, I timed it.
To be fair, the film does pick up considerably post-punch, as the
characters start to learn how far they’d go to ensure their own
survival. There’s some great drama and tension between the two camps
but the fact remains that only one of the characters is sympathetic
(the girl who didn’t want to go on board in the first place, of course)
and you don’t really care what happens to these people.
One saving grace is that the film does have a surprising amount of gore. Sure, with only
7 characters in the whole film the chances for bloody death are
limited, but there are some pretty grisly scenes on display here, and
even one of the more inventive kills in recent years. It’d really be stretching it to call this a horror flick, however- besides the amount of bloodshed this could be any other suspense flick.
Also, one might assume that with such a gimmicky title there’d at least
be a line of dark humor running throughout the film, right? Nope. It’s played
relatively straight. Missed opportunity.
Donkey Punch is a film that feels familiar and mediocre, and I have the feeling that if it weren’t for the title no one would be talking about it.
(Donkey Punch opened at Sundance (!) last year and hits theaters in limited release today courtesy Magnet
Releasing’s Six Shooter Film Series, which was kicked off by the winner and
still champion Let The Right One In.)