“It’s The Office meets American Psycho” screams the sleeve for 2009 production Corporate Cut Throat Massacre, but saying something doesn’t make it so, and anyone suckered in by that quote – presumably having missed the fact that this is ‘a Creep Creepersin film’ – will be sorely disappointed. In fact, it’s hard to imagine just who would be satisfied with this dreadful film.
The warning signs are there from the start, as a Texas Chain Saw Massacre pastiche opening scroll and voice-over tells us ‘the film in which you are about to see is an account of tragedy’ … erm, what?
And sadly, the production values are as clumsy as that opening sentence, with Creepersin’s hand-held wobbles (presumably imitating The Office) giving the film the look of a home movie shot by someone with the DTs, and the apparent lack of basics like lighting and sound equipment rendering the few steady shots dark, ugly and poorly recorded.
Given that this is – allegedly – a horror film, very little happens. The opening titles are stretched over 13 minutes of inane, hopefully improvised office chatter, and any hope that things will pick up is soon extinguished, as Creepersin, star/co-writer Elina Madison and one Tyger Torrez produce a screenplay that might accurately reflect the sheer tedium of office work, but fails miserably to entertain.
Madison plays a stereotyped bitch of a boss, forcing her sales staff to work late and firing people left, right and centre. And that, dear reader, is it for the first hour of the seventy minute film. Then, the final ten minutes delivers a clumsy and unconvincing twist as we find out the fate of the staff – as massacres go, this is too little, too late and too off-screen to have a chance of making up for the previous sixty minutes of boredom.
This is, presumably, supposed to be a satire, but you’ll be hard pressed to find any laughs here – not even at the expense of the non-actors who make up the cast. And don’t expect any sleaze either – Creepersin hires a few busty girls to play slutty characters, but presumably didn’t have the budget to pay the enough to remove their bras, and there’s no gore either, ensuring that the film can’t even hold the viewer’s attention through exploitative means.
Expecting quality film making from someone called Creep Creepersin is a fool’s errand, the sad thing is that there is the germ of a good idea here (and it’s handled slightly more effectively in Madison’s short film The Late Shift, the inspiration for this and included on the DVD). Unfortunately, this is woeful stuff that doesn’t work as workplace comedy, horror, or a study of the pressures of climbing the corporate ladder.
David Flint, MOVIES and MANIA
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