After blowing up their school toilet block during an attempt to create a bad-taste video, Dean (Rian Gordon), Duncan (Lewis Gribben) and the self-styled 'DJ Beatroot' (Viraj Juneja) choose the 'punishment' of a Duke of Edinburgh Award Highlands camping trip instead of expulsion. They are joined by the nerdy and solidly middle class Ian (Samuel Bottomley) who thinks a DoE Award will look good on his CV for uni. Dumped in the wilderness with minimal instructions by their past-caring supply teacher they head off across the hills.
As if their ignorance of the countryside and disaffected bravado aren;t handicap enough, they find themselves being hunted by a strange pair of tweeded and masked toffs who they name the Duke (Eddie Izzard) and Duchess (Georgie Glen), landowners who think that removing a few feral kids from the gene pool will improve the breeding stock. With their teacher 'accidentally' removed from the scene the four teenagers are left to depend on their own wits for survival.
There's a touch of Calibre in the plot, but the treatment is much more League of Gentlemen. Bizarre rituals, a farmers' rave and hallucinogenic rabbit shit turn up alongside strobing images and rapid flashbacks, coincidence and fantasy. The comic book approach makes for a fast ride, plenty of laughs and much silliness. There are some glaring weaknesses, with an overly daft police sub-plot wasting the combined talents of Kate Dickie and Kevin Guthrie, and the self-consciously contrived title showing a surprising lack of imagination given the ever changing nature of the content, but that's to be expected from director Ninian Doff's debut feature. There's a lot of promise in this movie, and he's got the balance between comedy and tension bang on - literally so in the crushing moment of the denouement. Strong performances too, notably from Gordon who makes Dean the most fully realised character of the group. Izzard and Glen look like they're having a lot of fun.
A very contemporary comedy horror of mixed qualities, but fun enough to be constantly entertaining.
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