UK Edition
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Screenwriters: Mark Tonderai
Starring: William Ash (interview), Christine Bottomley
Running Time: 82 mins
Certificate: 15
It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry while watching Hush, a risible British movie that purports to be horror. Mark Tonderai's offering is simply so awful in every possible aspect that the cinema soon begins to feel like a prison. Perhaps a bit of gallows humour, laughing at the pitiful use of celluloid, is the only way to avoid lapsing into severe depression during 82 minutes of crud.
On the theme of confinement and incarceration, the plot revolves around a truck filled with human captives that arouses the interest of young couple Zakes (William Ash) and Beth (Christine Bottomley) while they're driving on the motorway. In a terribly contrived moment, Zakes catches a glimpse of a caged woman when the truck's back door flips open in front of them. The usual cat and mouse japes ensue, as Zakes tries to track down his girlfriend when the shady truck driver snatches her, with hunter becoming hunted and vice versa.
This all sounds fairly run of the mill, but the execution drags it down into the gates of artistic hell. The dialogue is atrocious and strains for emotional authenticity in the early car-bound scenes between Zakes and Beth, and sounds like the kind of stilted pap an untalented 11-year-old might write for a Drama lesson. It gives the lead actors no chance, nor do any of the usual clichés of the horror genre. Zakes does some terribly stupid things to place himself in jeopardy for the sake of the plot and some cheap (attempted) thrills.
Guess what folks - when Zakes hides under the truck the villainous driver just happens to drop something on the ground and reach perilously close to the supposed hero's hiding place. Even better - when Zakes needs to drive off to escape the engine won't start. There's also a 'hiding in a toilet cubicle' scene. It's a shame the cast and crew didn't get flushed down the U-Bend in a freak accident while shooting that. God could have proven his existence by masterminding such an act in a bid to save culture, in a similar vein to that whole Noah's Ark kafuffle.
The fact that the movie plays it so straight, with no tongue in cheek while dragging up bedraggled cliché after cliché, suggests that there's been an assumption that cinemagoers have never seen horror films before... or they're treating us with abject contempt.
Has the world ever witnessed worse direction than on Hush? Quite possibly not. Even Alan Smithee would be ashamed to be associated with it. In particular, the constant shaking and jolting of the camera only serves to induce nausea and hurt the brain of any poor soul watching. If anyone dares to buy the DVD then don't be surprised to see some behind the scenes footage of cameramen being repeatedly sent into seizures through being poked by a cattle prod to produce the desired and terrible effect.
When used cleverly and selectively, like in The Blair Witch Project or NYPD Blue for example, such camerawork can add a real sense of immediacy to the situation and jar the viewer. But in Hush, Mark Tonderai deploys it for the most static, mundane and dramatically barren of scenes (there are a lot of them) and it's all utterly pointless and offensive to our senses. That pretty much sums up the whole shameful enterprise.
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