The Comedown

Another entry in the tower block/chav canon finds a group of ‘street’ teenagers battling, not aliens from 2011’s Attack the Block, but a deadly psychopath who’s seen a few too many Saw films, as has director Menhaj Huda.

Another entry in the tower block/chav
canon finds a group of ‘street’ teenagers battling, not aliens from 2011’s
Attack the Block, but a deadly psychopath who’s seen a few too many Saw films,
as has director Menhaj Huda.

When
Lloyd (Jacob Anderson) returns home
from a brief spell in prison, he’s keen to do right by his pregnant girlfriend
Jemma (Sophie Stuckley). So when he
and his friends decide to break into an abandoned tower block and set up a
pirate radio station, they haven’t banked on the high rise being inhabited by a
rather oddly-motivated psychopath.

Director
Huda directed the lauded Noel Clarke-penned
Kidulthood and so is well aware of
how to portray the kind of gang language and street characters on show here.
Sadly, the originality of that film is absent here in writer Steven Kendall’s script, meaning that no
amount of grisly death scenes can make up for some paper thin character
development and tepid plot.

While
the leads do their best with the material available – Anderson emerging as the
likeable anti-hero and Adam Deacon
hamming it up slightly as the gang boss Jason – anyone who’s watched any kind
of gorenography that the last ten years have been pumping out steadily will know
exactly what to expect.

However
while the first Saw had plenty of
originality and recent entries like the comic-horror of Cabin in the Woods played around with the idea of demented serial
killers, here Comedown (derived from
the fact that the events take place after a rather drug-fuelled night) never
reaches much of a high. Instead characters die in all too familiar
circumstances and the killer’s motive, when revealed, is likely to elicit a
snigger rather than a scream.

So
despite some impressive moments of cinematography (making good use of the high
rise setting) Comedown does little
to rise above the slew of similar slasher movies, coming down near the bottom
of any top 50 of the genre sadly.