RAZOR'S RING

RAZOR'S RING

Smarmy businessman Scott (Casey Wayne) pulls his car up alongside a quiet country road one morning and rings his colleague to brag about the party they were at the night before. Then he leaves the car behind and embarks on a job along the deserted lane, presumably having been instructed by writer-director Morgan Hampton to run like a fucking idiot.

Scott only gets a few metres before another car pulls up beside him and Julie (Lisa Wharton) leans out of the passenger window pointing a gun in his face. She tells Scott to get in the car and he doesn't need too much persuasion - Julie and the unshaven Razor (Paul Schilens) driving obviously aren't kidding.

Just in case there's any doubt, we get to see how serious the pair are when a traffic cop pulls them over for speeding and they both take turns in blowing him to pieces. It turns out that they're on a drunken afternoon out shooting and running people over for fun. So, why pick Scott up? Why indeed.

Anyway, a few minutes later they stumble across a family picnicking beside the open road. Why? Why indeed! Among them is a young girl who has strayed too near the asphalt. This excites Julie as Razor prepares to mow the little treasure down.

Fortunately for the girl, her grandfather spies the incoming danger and pushes her out of the way. Unfortunately for him, he consequently takes the full force of the car and dies on impact. The car crashes, and the shocked family rush over to it - one of them screaming "I wanna piece of these bastards" ... but it's not immediately apparent how literal that statement will prove to be.

Scott, Julie and Razor are taken hostage by the family who drive back to their country home where they intend to imprison them until their matriarch, wheelchair-bound Red (Annie Scott Rogers), decides what their fate should be. Given that we soon discover this family are cannibals, it shouldn't take readers long to guess what Red has in mind ...

Can the three prisoners work together to escape their small wooden hut confines before Julie has to get naked for the country boys again, Razor suffers more electrocution torture and all three of them wind up being the main course?

Poorly framed, cheaply shot and relying on natural light to bypass the need for anything else, RAZOR'S RING looks and feels like a bunch of mates who hired a camera for the weekend and made up a plot to suit whatever they had to their immediate disposal. A house and a couple of cars, in this case.

Performances are largely amateur-hour, Hampton's script is hokey and derivative (everything from DEATH RACE 2000, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, MOTHER'S DAY, SCRAPBOOK and THE DEVIL'S REJECTS is evoked, serving to remind us that we could be watching something much better) and audio is frequently dipping due to limited microphone resources.

In its favour, the film starts off at a cracking speed and Thomas Ganmor's score is pretty exciting. But it all peters out rather quickly (around about when Red is introduced, actually) and after the premise is established, RAZOR'S RING finds itself wandering aimlessly with nowhere left to go.

You don't get many leading men sporting moustaches these days, and Wayne is a good example of why. At certain angles he looks like Basil Fawlty. This doesn't help when Hampton wants us to root for him. Therein lies another problem with the film: the victims are not sympathetic (two of them have already been seen killing innocent people and animals, for God's sake), and the villains are not scary. The dialogue is riddled with cliché, and spoken by people who seem almost embarrassed to be reciting it.

And for those with a penchant for sexual sadism, I'm sorry to disappoint you: the title of this no-budget backwoods effort doesn't refer to Razor getting a jolly good buggering ...

MVM Entertainment's disc spares every expense, opening up with a static main menu page which leads into an equally unimaginative static scene-selection menu allowing access to the main feature via just 6 chapters.

The film itself is presented uncut in its original full-frame aspect ratio and looks decent enough for the main part. An extremely cheap offering that looks to have been shot on DV, it is nevertheless colourful and the constantly sunny exteriors ensure a fair bit of brightness throughout. It's not a great transfer by any means, but it's perfectly good for the film on offer.

Audio is provided in English 2.0 and again is mostly decent. As mentioned earlier there are a few instances of dialogue becoming less audible, but this is seemingly a problem with how it was recorded rather than any flaw in the disc's mastering.

The only extra relating to RAZOR'S RING is a 90-second trailer which does a fair job of hinting at how lame the film is.

The only other bonus material on the disc is trailers for other MVM titles: ZOMBEAK!, DR CHOPPER, MR HALLOWEEN, BACKWOODS BLOODBATH and THE HAUNTING OF MARSTEN MANOR. I've seen all but one of these films (unless I've also seen MARSTEN MANOR? I forget now ...) and there seems to be a recurring theme here - they're all shit.

Morgan Hampton is a great name for a film director. And, given that this is his feature debut, he may well get there yet. But RAZOR'S RING is 82 minutes of my life that I'll never get back. I'll find some solace in that if I've managed to persuade just one curious person that their time and money are too valuable to waste on crap like this.

Review by Stu Willis


 
Released by MVM
Region 2 - PAL
Rated 18
Extras :
see main review
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