Michael Basset, director of DEATHWATCH, has updated his personal website with a ton of stills from his newest pic WILDERNESS. He’s also been kind enough to share a trailer that was cut together for investors. It’s not the Official trailer for the flick, but holy shite does it kick ass!
The story behind this nasty piece is brutal and fun: A group of young offenders are delivered to an island for a week of character building exercises after one of their fellow inmates commits suicide.. It all goes horribly wrong when they realise that there’s someone else on the island who has a pack of dogs and a crossbow with which to hunt them down.
Basically it’s a slasher movie but it’s turned out to be a lot more interesting than that, largely because the performances and characters are quite unusual for this kind of movie. It has a very ‘real’ feel to it but is still very visceral, pretty horrifying and rather exciting. So with great performances, some terrifically gory set-pieces and a nice gritty feel to it all it’s turned out like a combination of ‘Scum’, ‘Battle Royale’ and, ‘Deliverance’ with a little ‘Lord of the Flies’ thrown in for good measure.
Basset really raises expectations with his claims in the second paragraph of the synopsis, but from the looks of the trailer it’s all well deserved. This thing looks very exciting, and appears to still need a US distributor…hint, hint studio folks. UK denizens will be able to check it out this summer.