CORPORATE CUT THROAT MASSACRE

When I saw this film bills itself as "a suspenseful blend of comedy and horror in the vein of The Office and American Psycho’, I hoped for the best: true ‘horror comedy’ is an elusive beast, so any example which successfully uses the subtle or satirical styles of the above would be worth seeing. Well, I’ll admit that I haven’t seen the American version of The Office, but here, let me sum up how far Corporate Cut Throat Massacre can be compared to the original British series…

It takes place in an office.

Voila!

Far from being a clever black comedy, there’s very little comedy - or horror, for that matter - in this film. Partially-clad boss Brandi Babcock (Elina Madison) runs an office…sales, or something nondescript, and divides her time between over pronouncing her dialogue, bullying her staff and - no, actually that’s it. After some filler takes place which shows us the vagaries of office life, Ms. Babcock calls a meeting. Figures are down, so the two staff members with the worst sales profiles are going to get fired and everyone has to stay behind to work on their company records. The film takes a few moments to show us some employees potentially-aggrieved-to-the-point-of-insanity and then does absolutely nothing more…until we’re fifty minutes in. That’s fifty minutes before even the vaguest hint of horror. What we get instead is inane interaction between the staff and plenty of close-up shots of staplers and paper clips just in case we forget where we are. If you are in danger of nodding off, the director throws in a few bosom-level camera shots to potentially stir you out of your repose. Not only does everyone have the type of surgically-spoiled tits which keep the bra up and not the other way round (well, the women anyway) but the boss looks like a former stripper, has the personality of a cartoon villain, one girl candidly drinks vodka from the bottle in her cubicle and the men throw things at each other. This is, by and large, the extent of the plot….If the performances were campy enough, or the script lively enough, then all this could potentially be funny, but in trying to ape the subtlety of The Office the filmmakers here have failed; they just can’t maintain the low-key style they’ve plumped for.

However, so much is basically wrong with this film that finding fault with the tone or the pace really just feels like we’re getting ahead of ourselves. It’s all shot on a handheld camera - which is overdone everywhere these days, and immensely irritating - whilst the colouration is incredibly washed-out with a bluish, unreal tone. It’s likely that office CCTV would have been more watchable in terms of quality footage. The sound quality is abysmal too; it buzzes, echoes, rises and falls whilst the background noise (of phones, again, just so we always remember where we are) actually interferes with the ability to hear the dialogue. Not irritated enough? Throw in some constantly cutting-on-and-off incidental music for good measure, then try to make out the obviously ad lib lines from the cast (unless they just hadn’t learned their lines, of course) for the best part of an hour before an anaemic ‘surprise’ ending makes the duration of the prior material feel even more exasperating.

With no successful jokes and almost no trace of even formulaic horror, I can find nothing to recommend Corporate Cut Throat Massacre. Now, I haven’t seen anything else from the prolific output of director Creep Creepersin, so it might be that this is his first and only duff movie - same goes for co-writer and star Elina Madison, who has a long list of indie horror and sleaze roles to her name. I’m going to take a guess though: just by looking at the sheer number of schlock horrors on those lists it seems as if quantity wins over quality. Flooding the indie movie market with lacklustre crap doesn’t do any of us any good. Having watched the extras on this release, I discovered that The Corporate Cut Throat Massacre was based on a short film entitled ‘The Late Shift’ which basically carries most of the plot-carrying scenes used in the feature, right down to an identical script. When you’re building a feature out of a short by stuffing the short with filler scenes then you might as well not do it.

Well, for the curious, this short is included as one of the extras, alongside a ten-minute interview with cast and crew, an odd feature about the crew’s worst jobs (presumably aside from this one) and a director’s commentary. This release is chaptered and the feature runs for 70 minutes plus 33 minutes of extras.

Review by Keri O’Shea