F. Could stand for anything. In this review’s case it could stand for ‘fantastic’ or ‘far-fetched’ or it could even represent the grade that I give it at the bottom of the page…
F revolves around essentially a group of folks who must defend themselves against a gang of kids who terrorise a local school on one dark night ‘after hours’. I missed the film at theaters, and only knew of it as being the film debut of that lovely looking lady from Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks, Roxanne McKee. It does however, have a little more to it than that. A little.
David Schofield plays a alcoholic school teacher who is the victim of a violent attack in the classroom that takes place 11 months before the main events of the movie. He is also a teacher who just happens to have rebel daughter Kate (Eliza Bennett) in his class. After misbehaving one day, Kate is kept behind on detention by her own father on an evening when a group of youths decide to unleash hell on said school.
What follows is overdone, very, very predictable stuff. Phone lines are cut, random acts of violence occur and one by one, people are ‘offed’. Now, said motivation for this attack is seemingly unknown, and indeed not revealed in the film at all — but when it comes, it unrelents.
Usually, I’m quite a fan of this genre of movie. The perpetrators in this case are hooded teens, or we take it that they are humans, but essentially the set-up and execution are very similar to any other British horror -thriller. Take Christopher Smith’s CREEP, or even his follow-up SEVERENCE, two movies that I massively enjoyed upon their initial release. Or even THE COTTAGE, a Brit-horror film from a couple of years ago featuring another soap cast off in the form of buxom Jennifer Ellison. Enjoyed that too. This, I struggled with. In fact, I watched this twice (in a weekend where I might add that I had six new DVD releases to review), just to give it a chance. Nope. It still didn’t grab me, not even after that second viewing.
The problem is this. The first ten minutes set up what could possibly be an interesting plot. We have an alcoholic school teacher who is battling his own demons, trying to forge a relationship with his teenage daughter and her mother. I was interested as to where this was going; it felt different. I loved the up close, in-your-face framing and cinematography, and even the drained colour tones employed. I was looking forward to where this character that we had just been introducd to was being taken. Yes, I loved the first ten minutes. It felt original, and raw. What followed was not. It was merely a cat and mouse chase featuring under-developed characters that relied too heavily on cliched horror tricks that we have seen done a million times before. I was uninterested in any of these characters, and I really couldn’t care for any of them. Completely uninvested in any of them. In fact, all that we seemed to see were completely random characters getting bumped off one after the other. Security guard, cleaner, teacher, hot girl… etc, etc… and if you’re holding out for some Roxanne McKee eye candy, yes; you get to see her running on a tread mill (in slow-motion no less) thirty minutes in. Yes, she is wearing tight lycra, but she must be in this movie for no more than fifteen minutes. I just wanted to see more of her acting abilities and less of the scream queen she portrays here.
On the plus side, and there is one… I think that Johannes Roberts shows promise as a director and as I briefly mentioned above, I did like the cinematography, and the central acting merits of David Schofield must be applauded for making the most of the material.
To be honest F will find an audience on DVD, and yes, it is possibly worth a watch if you enjoy a no-nonsense cat-and-mouse horror, but there are definitely better examples out there.
Grade: D (not F)
Extras: Interesting ‘making of,’ interview with Roxanne McKee and director’s commentary.
