At it’s best tense and unsettling, this is a decent paranoid urban horror film in which a pair of hot girls (blonde Cameron Goodman, brunette Peyton List) arrive at a weirdly deserted Chicago airport, get hit on by two horny but harmless guys and make the fateful decision of opting for a half-price shuttle bus into the (strangely deserted) city.

  The bus is ran off the road in a quiet backstreet and - wouldn’t you know! - all cell phones cease to be of any use whatsoever. What’s more, the ordinary-looking, seemingly mild-mannered driver turns out to be a sadistic bastard who sets the girls a series of challenges (one of which is a slightly more intense version of the basic set - up of TV‘s “Supermarket Sweep”) and reacts badly to resistance. The men are rendered useless or mutilated early on, and things escalate over the single night in which the movie unfolds.

   Writer-director Anderson apes the SAW franchise (the main villain has definite echoes of Tobin Bell) but increases the impact of his most dramatic scenes by discreetly conveying the violence rather than laying it on with a trowel. One of the nastiest moments - the forcible removal of someone’s ass tattoo - is all the more powerful for taking place off-screen. Also representative of the post-SAW genre climate is the presence of a midway twist in which the cowardly guy passenger who looked like an insurance salesman is revealed to be a perverted psycho working with the driver.

   The movie is over-stretched for a fairly thin premise that would have made a dynamic short (or formed a strong part of a horror anthology). Helping to sustain it are some above-average performances : the two girls are both credible, and Tony Curran, as the lead villain known only as “The Driver”, underplays effectively as a soft-spoken evil bastard. (Bizarrely, Curran’s last genre credit was as “Driver” of the MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN).

   It’s well sustained for a movie that takes place mostly in a shuttle bus, and the sour twist is worth waiting for. One of the most satisfying things about the current horror cycle is the return of mean-spirited resolutions. Here, the movie fades out by finally revealing the logic behind all of Curran’s challenges, and the last we see our resilient survivor girl she’s being shipped off in a crate to join the merry sex slaver trade in East Asia.