This messy but enjoyably off the wall movie pulls off a tone switch early on that may have been inspired by FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, with a banter-fuelled Tarantino-influenced heist flick turning into a hostage drama and then a full-blown slapstick gore comedy complete with a thundering yet ballistic ritualistic killer!
A bunch of would-be thieves led by American Stephen Dorff are in Moscow on a mission to retrieve a magical cross for gang boss Sean Pert wee (having fun with a ripe, hammy Russian accent). En route they take a mixed bag of locals hostage, including a former army guy who recalls his days of “bullying, cannibalism and homosexual rape” with something approaching unhealthy nostalgia. Both criminals and hostages wind up being stalked by a pissed off, barbarian-like descendant of Ivan The Terrible (!) with his own designs on the cross.
BOTCHED has an odd pedigree – it’s a UK / Russian co-production mostly shot in Dublin – and an even odder, largely Russian cast of characters. Though the script doesn’t always get the consistent laughs it seeks, the secondary characters are amusingly bizarre and broadly played by some pleasingly unfamiliar, unusual actors. (The exception is Dorff, who plays it so straight it’s easy to consider that he walked on to the wrong film set while shooting a different, serious heist flick).
Almost entirely set in a single building in and around a series of booby-trapped corridors, the movie veers from fart gags and joke beheadings/impaling to all-purpose weirdness, including a deliberately hokey puppet rat with a tendency to drag along freshly severed heads. Attending the movie’s premiere in London in August, first-time director Kit West was notably nervous prior to the screening, but needn’t have been – the pic plays well with an audience, especially the London one who, prior to BOTCHED, had just been traumatized by the unrelenting grimness of JACK KETCHUM’S THE GIRL NEXT DOOR.
The gore is fun : a splashy scissor decapitation kicks the pace into first gear, and there’s a possible RESERVOIR DOGS homage in which the sexy Russian heroine loses an ear (thought she recovers far too easily, even for a horror comedy). The plot descends into incoherence and parts of the movie are a little self conscious, but this genre-bending oddity is quirky in an appealing sort of way and at its best captures a sense of inspired lunacy reminiscent of early Zucker brothers comedies and the EVIL DEAD trilogy.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
