Back in 2016 the film From a House on Willow Street screened as part of the FrightFest line-up. Now four years later, director Alastair Orr returns with his follow-up, Triggered. Inspired by retro video games from the nineties, Triggered joins nine friends as they reunite for a camping trip in the woods. Things start well enough, they all enjoying some food and booze around the campfire before retiring for the night. They then awake in the middle of the night to discover that they have been strapped into vests hooked up to explosive devices. Each vest has its own countdown with a different amount of time, and it becomes quickly apparent that they are the unwitting players in a sadistic game – the rules are simple – only the one with the most amount of time will survive. Will the group band together to solve their problem, or will fractures within them see friend turn on friend.
It doesn’t take long for it to become clear that these friends aren’t quite the close-knit clan that they’re trying to portray. It has been a number of years since they were all in school together and it’s pretty obvious that they were friends of convenience rather than anything deeper. The group is also formed of more than a few egotists, so bloodshed is a shoe-in. How they were ever friends at all is a question that the viewer will be asking as The Descent-level cracks in their relationships open up almost immediately. This of course means we get straight into the battle for survival without any of the build-up that similar films like Battle Royale and The Hunger Games relied on. By jumping head-first into the action the audience find themselves in a similar situation to the characters – grasping to figure out what is happening and how best to react to it.
A point of frustration with Triggered is that it’s a little hard to distinguish between some of the characters. Several of the female cast all have long, loose, brunette hair, and at least two of the guys have short dark hair and muscular physiques. Were this film to be set during the day, these similarities wouldn’t cause too many problems, but when you factor in that the film is set entirely in the dark, it gets a little confusing trying to work out who is who. As events progress, it get’s a little simpler to differentiate, but it is certainly a struggle at first. Not only are our cast of characters visually similar, most of them are also pretty unpleasant people. Making up these undesirables are a girl whom framed her teacher as a sexual predator, a cheat, a guy in a band called Butthole Equinox (classy), and another guy whom is so conceited that he remarks ‘good work tonight’ to his girlfriend after they’ve just had sex. This of course helps the audience cope with the inevitable deaths. Were all the characters to be likeable innocents then Triggered would be one heck of an ordeal to watch. By having such a varied crew of mean girls and boys you can almost enjoy their demises, akin to the way we used to watch eighties horror films.
If the heightened premise of Triggered sounds a little close to that of a Jigsaw trap, that’s because it is, although it isn’t approached with the same super-serious tone of Saw. Instead, writer David D. Jones and director Alastair Orr injects a wry sense of humour into proceedings. It utilises that same brand of self-deprecating, self-aware humour, that made both Scream and Cabin in the Woods so popular. One of the characters acknowledges the similarity of their situation with the Saw films, with further nod, nod, wink, wink moments scattered throughout. There are also a lot of sly little references to films such as American Psycho, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, which will keep the film fanatics suitably entertained.
Visually, the film is strikingly dynamic. Despite the slight niggle of not easily being able to work out who is who aside, Triggered offers a lot for the viewer to engage with. There’s an effective use of lights on the vest that not only help to illuminate the scenes, but also serve to help the viewer work out which people have the greater amount of time on their clocks. The lighting system works very much like the standard traffic light system with green being good, amber being danger and red being it’s time to kill or be killed. The use of this system means that we mitigate the need to constantly keep flashing back to the countdown clocks to get the same information. The vest displays are also pretty nifty, and are a clear nod to the handheld gaming devices of yesteryear, with cute little graphics and animations that will have those of us of a certain age feeling pangs of nostalgia.
The gore gags to have been expertly put together. There are many different methods of deaths on display and each one comes off as authentic. This is a considerable marvel when you factor in that this is a low budget indie horror. Nonetheless, Orr and his crew milk every penny and put it onto the screen to produce a film that easily feels twice as expensive as it probably was.
Yes, there’s a bit of a confusing game of who’s who for a portion of the film, but that issue aside, Triggered makes for a strong entry into the battle royale sub-genre.
Triggered was reviewed at Arrow Video FrightFest 2020. Triggered is released on Altitude.film and other digital platforms from 13 September.
Triggered
Summary
An explosive and electrifying tale of the fickle foundations of friendships and the primal instinct to survive at all costs, Triggered owns its heightened premise, and has a lot of fun doing so.
