We hope you enjoyed our October festival.
The terror of Mayhem will stay with us forever.
We hope you enjoyed our March festival as much as we did.
bang! recently provided a regionally themed programme for the re-opening of s Old Market Square in Feb., read and hear about it at the B.B.C. Website
We're providing production assistance to The Friends of Northern Uganda for The Running Water charity.
We enjoyed our Game City screening
Writeup for the August bang!.
Over 40 films in the Bang! channel & more on Brit Films' Channel.
bang! short film festival
Geoffrey Macnab in Brussels 21 March 2006Dir: Michael J. Bassett. UK 2006. 91mins
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Get them out of here. Get them to the island and teach them a bloody lesson! the governor at a young offenders institution roars at the inmates early on in Wilderness, Michael Bassett's lurid but enjoyably cheesy horror picture. |
This is not subtle film-making. Dario Poloni's screenplay is influenced by a huge array of sources, with nods to everything from Alan Clark's Scum to Lord Of The Flies, The Blair Witch Project, Deliverance, Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, even Alien. The premise - depositing a group of urban kids in a remote wilderness - isn't so far removed from that of various reality TV series. The performances, from a young cast, are uneven (in their more exaggerated moments, they evoke memories of popular British kids drama Grange Hill.) and the plotting is contrived in the extreme, but the film-makers attack their material with plenty of gusto.
Wilderness is one of a large number of low-budget British horror movies made in recent years. Although it is strictly genre fare, it received backing (a sign of the growing respectability of horror in the British market) and is produced by Ecosse Films, a company generally associated with more upscale fare like Mrs Brown, Charlotte Gray and BBC drama series Monarch Of The Glen.
Whether Wilderness will enjoy the same success as its near cousins, Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers and The Descent, remains to be seen, but indulgent teen audiences should enjoy its shock tactics: with its diet of decapitation, severed limbs and dog-ravaged corpses, it certainly wont disappoint anyone looking for gore. UK distributor Momentum has pencilled in a late summer release: the film premiered at the Brussels International Festival Of Fantastic Film.
| Production company | Ecosse Films |  |
| International sales | ||
| UK distribution | Momentum | |
| Producers | Robert Bernstein, John McDonnell, Douglas Rae | |
| Screenplay | Dario Poloni | |
| Cinematography | Peter Robertson | |
| Editor | Kate Evans | |
| Music | Mark Thomas | |
| Main cast | Sean Pertwee, Alex Reid, Tobey Kebbell, Stephen Wight |
