56 out of 72 people found the following review helpful:
The DeliverOffice
Mike Thomas from South Wales,
30th August, 2006
Splicing comedy and horror, 'Severance' is an amusing and sometimes painfully tense riff on 'Deliverance', populated by stereotypes from 'The Office' or 'The Smoking Room' - Danny Dyer's wideboy loafer, Tim McInnerney's anal boss with his irritating 'manager speak', Toby Stephens' slimy smoothy et al. The film starts slow - and is a little uneven at times - with our motley crew from weapons manufacturer Palisades being coached into the Hungarian wilds for a 'team building' holiday. Unfortunately, events conspire to lead them to the wrong lodge building in the woods... and it all goes downhill from there. Suffice to say, there's not a lot of team building to be had, as our protagonists are 'offed' in increasingly wild and gruesomely wacky ways (some of which will make you laugh out loud or cringe behind your fingers). Standout is one character's death by beheading, where his earlier musings on the ability for the human brain to survive being detached from the body for several minutes are proved, ridiculously and much to his pleasure, as correct. 'Severance' is low-budget stuff, to be frank, and there are occasions when the jokes fall flat, but the tension builds nicely as the lodge eventually becomes surrounded by the shadowy army figures who turn the Palisades' staff weapons against them. If you like survival horror, then this is lean, mean (knife in the anus, anyone?) and sometimes butt-clenchingly funny (check out the scene with the severed leg in the coach fridge...). It's also better than most of the so-called 'gorenography' releases ('Hostel', 'Slither' etc) of late - and it's British!
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