HIT AND RUN

(A.k.a. BUMPER)

Mary (Laura Breckenridge) gets drunk at her boyfriend Rick's (Christopher Shand) house party. However, despite her pleas for her to stay on, she decides to leave early and stumbles drunkenly into her 4x4.

Driving along the quiet night road singing to a song on the car stereo, Mary suddenly needs to swerve to avoid something in the middle of the road. This sends her careering down an embankment and into the dark woods. Composing herself, an uninjured Mary drives home and thinks nothing more about the incident.

At home, Mary listens to a message on the answer-machine - her parents have been invited away for the weekend: she has the house to herself. She's initially delighted by this prospect but the fun soon ends when she's awoken in the night by clattering coming from the garage.

Mary investigates the noises and finds Timothy (Kevin Corrigan) covered in blood and hanging precariously from the 4x4's bumper. He's in a bad way but still conscious. Mary's first reaction is to flee into the house and dial 911. However, considering the implications, she decides against completing the call and instead returns to the garage, telling Timothy she'll get help.

Unfortunately the plan soon changes when Timothy unexpectedly grabs Mary's ankle. She panics and bludgeons him repeatedly with the nearest thing to hand: a golf club.

After vomiting profusely, the luckless girl gathers her wits and heaves Timothy's motionless body into the back of her 4x4. She drives to the nearby woods and digs a ditch in the rain. Then, following a night of sobbing into her pillow, Mary rises in the morning and sets about the unsavoury task of washing away the righteous gore in the garage. She even rams the 4x4 into a tree several times in a bid to disguise the original dent made by running Timothy over. It seems her tracks are covered.

But guilt starts to get the better of Mary. Strange noises in the house and her own hallucinations don't help matters, nor does Rick's incredulous reaction to her confession when he pops over to see her. Then the spooky stuff happens - Timothy's face appearing in a missing ad on TV, creepy telephone calls to the house and Mary's growing sense that she's being watched. Suddenly she finds herself home alone and in one of those dreaded teen-in-peril scenarios …

HIT AND RUN sounds crap on paper and in fairness is probably too thin storywise to merit an 80-minute running time. It would've been more successful as a short. But it gets by thanks to it's unrelenting pace, superior performances (Breckenridge is excellent, and cute) and a wild shift into enjoyably OTT EC horror comics territory in the third act.

Owing much in terms of economic atmospherics, off-kilter scares and wry character observations to HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR, this US production successfully harks back to the halcyon days of low-budget British efforts from the 1970s, while keeping a keen eye on contemporary genre traits such as uber-gore and even suggesting (though thankfully not wallowing in) torture porn.

Edna McCallion's direction is wisely straight-forward, allowing for the story to unfold in an uncomplicated and forthright manner. The tendency with such simplistic material these days is to disguise it with flashy directorial gimmicks but, aside from a distracting split-screen telephone conversation and an out-of-place nod to REQUIEM FOR A DREAM in a fast-edit pill-popping scene, McCallion avoids such traps.

A satisfying minor film that delivers much more than expected. It may start off being too similar to Stuart Gordon's superb STUCK (itself inspired by a true-life event, surely the same source of inspiration here), but it happily deviates into less humourous, more brutally nightmarish territory during the second half.

HIT AND RUN gets a good airing on DVD, presented in an extremely attractive anamorphic 2.35:1 transfer. Colours are strong and well-controlled, while images are given sharp representation throughout. Blacks are solid and the overall texture lends a sheen that befits such a contemporary film.

Audio is available in a rousing 5.1 mix, offering an even balance in choices of English, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and French languages. Optional subtitles are available in a remarkable 16 different languages, including all of the above.

Static menu pages are a little drab, while the scene-selection menu boasts a respectable 20 chapters.

There are no extras on the disc.

HIT AND RUN is a fun film that manages to successfully mix elements of older horrors with more up-to-date genre fare. The trappings of it's low budget origins are evident but it's little wonder that 20th Century Fox picked it up for domestic distribution regardless. Enthusiastic, pacy and in tune with the spirit of the Grand Guignol, HIT AND RUN is a pleasant surprise.

Review by Stu Willis