The Furies

'Bad people like watching it on the internet' is slowly becoming as popular a premise for horror films as 'If I don't do this dare I'll lose all my YouTube fans'. It's an excuse for setting up all sorts of ludicrous situations. In this case, the basic theme is an old one - the hunting of humans - but rather than having the hunters be fully human themselves, it presents them as masked, psychopathic, bestial horror movie monsters with a nod to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. They're exclusively hunting young women (and in one case a girl), dispatching them in gory ways for the titillation of an unseen dark web audience.

Kayla (Airlie Dodds) doesn't seem to be the kind of woman the game's managers usually choose. Unlike others we meet she has no history of breaking rules or getting into trouble wit the law - she's just out with a friend who is spraying graffiti when she's snatched from the street. When she wakes up, she's out in the Australian bush and in the middle of a nightmare scenario. Unlike the other women she meets there, she has no hard edges, no instinct for putting herself first in order to survive. This isn't all bad for her, however. Her more reflective stance leads to her figuring out a few things about how the game is played, and building alliances with other women might just change the odds.

There's not a great deal of strategy involved in Tony D'Aquino's film, which mostly concerns itself with bloody violence, screaming and running about. It's reasonably well paced but nevertheless starts to wear thin after a while. Kayla's gradual process of toughening up is nothing we haven't seen a thousand times before and the moral dilemmas the film presents are equally unsurprising. There is a new idea at the core of it but it hasn't been fleshed out enough and there's too little else going on to justify the 82 minute running time.

Screening at Frightfest, this film will doubtless have succeeded in hooking some die hard slasher fans but it seems destined to go direct to digital and disappear among countless similar works.