Salvage

People usually salvage things from being lost or wasted and put them back to some kind of good use. Here, the makers of this eponymous exercise have knowingly gone back to some horror film stalwarts and lifted some classic licks for their own crack at the genre. Thing is, nothing they scavenge needed rescuing and they don’t recycle their finds into anything we haven’t already better appreciated before.

From its title down, Salvage might know very well that horror films rest on some established well-grizzled tropes, but its more prestigious alumni, such as Night Of The Living Dead, Right At Your Door, The Descent and The Crazies, easily shrug this less than tricksy monster off their shoulders.

It’s Christmas Eve and sparky teen Jodie’s (Linzey Cocker) dad drops her off to reluctantly spend some time with her estranged mother, Beth (Neve McIntosh). No sooner has Jodie closed the front door on the conventional cul-de-sac community than she walks in on Beth and stranger Kieran (Shaun Dooley, mid one-night stand. Outraged Jodie storms off, mortified Beth chases after her, embarrassed Kieran has a shower.

When Jodie holes up at a neighbour’s and refuses to see her mother, Beth’s day then turns from a bad hangover into a visceral nightmare as she is hurled to the ground by a soldier. Immediately the Close is stormed by a shouting, gun-in-faces special ops army unit.

With no explanations Beth is forced indoors to spend more time with the increasingly distraught Kieran. With communications down, siege mentality kicks in as they are drip-fed information. Somehow the terror outside is related to whatever was inside the busted shipping container that washed up on the nearby beach. As the neighbourhood body count starts rising Beth frantically tries to get her daughter back. Everyone is ordered to stay in their houses and amid the chaos Beth’s neighbour Mr Sharma is gunned down on his lawn.

Salvage is the debut movie from director Lawrence Gough, previously a short filmer of some note. Clearly working on limited resources of all kinds he manages to stage some effective scenes that showcase a clear talent. This is most in evidence when indoors, staging nervy exchanges in readily identifiable homely settings that slowly reveal stark scenes of gory carnage.

Using TV land’s Brookside Close obviously helps, both from a cheaper production angle and in reinforcing the anyday, anywhere suburbia. It’s a frightening world beyond the domestic comforts we secure behind our front doors. Out there its bloody survival, where vicious prejudice and judgement are rife. When you get to the pavement, everyone’s fair game and the authorities hardly seem to be on your side.

From the very beginning it is stressed that early victim Mr Sharma is clearly not a white demographic member, so Kieran assumes that the spattered lockdown is the result of a terrorist attack. Al-Qaeda can be our neighbours, working as affluent doctors, striking on our doorstep, so the nightmare he always thought could happen really is happening to him now, he all too readily concludes. Of more substance and interest are the comments that surround Beth, working as a successful commercial lawyer but polarised from her daughter. Through her ordeal we can see how a patriarchal society views professional women and the choices they have to make - and how they’re punished for it. This is further underlined by the philandering Kieran’s cushy home life.

So, thematically there’s a little marrow in these foraged, splintered bones and the committed playing from McIntosh gives them some lumps of meat, but the tendons that would hold them together are cotton thin. Colin (Hollyoaks) O’Donnell’s script is too implausible at times and entirely too derivative to the point of blatant forewarning and can actually suck the tension back out of Gough’s scenes. The other disappointment is the editing. Scenes have either suffered due to budget constraints or have been sliced for pace, but this results in too many disjointed sequences that fundamentally break the narrative and your concentration. Combined with the screenplay this sadly turns the interesting home-grown contents into an unsatisfactory crate best left on the seashore.