Salvage

It's 24 December. 14 year old Jodie normally lives with her Dad (Ray from Life on Mars) but is being dropped off at her mum's house on a middle-class Wirral estate, against her will, for Christmas. Her mum, Beth, is a lawyer who sacrificed her relationship with Jodie for her career - a relationship which doesn't improve when Jodie immediately catches her in flagrante with Keiron, a stranger (well, a bloke from various British soap operas). Jodie storms off to her friend's house across the road. Almost immediately, a bunch of soldiers descend on the cul-de-sac, forcing everyone into their homes and shooting a local Asian doctor (prompting Kieron's tabloid-knee-jerk assumption that Al-Qaida have descended on suburban Merseyside). The bloody deaths keep coming at some pace, and it turns out the trigger-happy army isn't the only deadly force Beth will have to overcome to find and protect Jodie.

For the look and feel of the film, think Brookside with blood, filmed in natural - that is, not very much - light using a presumably fairly cheap digital set-up. (You can see the pixellation on the cinema screen.) Terror and quasi-zombie elements aside, the relationships between the major characters - not to mention whole sections of the script - could have been lifted straight from the erstwhile C4 soap.* That's no bad thing, as it helps establish the everyday normalcy of the setting, enhancing the identification and fear factors when the cadavers start piling up and chaos reigns. And it won't disappoint those who like their horror violent and blood-soaked, receiving an 18 certificate from the BBFC for that reason. As their classification decision accurately puts it:

The strong bloody violence and gore occurs throughout the film and includes two throat slitting scenes where blood pumps from victims’ necks, several bloody shootings and some close up detail of gory injuries, including spurting blood pooling in open wounds and pumping from arteries. There is further gory imagery, including blood spatters all over domestic environments, sight of very bloody dead bodies and characters covered in blood.

Salvage opened in cinemas yesterday and is released on DVD on Monday (though it's already available to rent and buy on iTunes) - more information, and trailer, on the official site. In London, it's only showing at Empire Leicester Square and Mile End's Genesis - and the latter only once, a screening that attracted a grand total of five cinemagoers. Including me. All men, all on our own - of course. But at least I had a row of seats to myself and no-one was eating popcorn or giggling.

It's a shame, however, because Salvage does deserve a wider audience than that. The occasionally limping build-up gives way to a fast-paced gorefest of an ending, and clocking in at only 80 minutes long viewing it hardly takes a huge chunk out of the day. The lack of lighting was my main problem with it, though I may be out on a limb here given that I thought that Alien and The Descent both suffered from the same problem. So, while it may be too late to catch it on the big screen, it's worth bunkering down with the DVD - lights off and volume high!

* Having written that, I found one reason for the eerie similarity: it was filmed on Brookside's set, according to iMDB!