Actor Tony Manders emailed to let me know his latest horror epic Wreck (2020) is on Amazon prime. Is the world quite ready for a breeding of the British gangster movie with the Bigfoot genre? Tony and his producer cohort Ben Loyd-Holmes (formerly of Carnivore: Werewolf of London) seem to think so, as a geezer-bird (Gemma Harlow Dean) gets trapped under a car and has to defend herself against some sweary hardmen and a "big hairy fucker" (they try to get round the UK’s lack of a history with Bigfoot type creatures by suggesting that fracking may be to blame for the creature).
The multi-genred Wreck is a film of almost three different parts. The first diving deep into that bastion of the supermarket DVD era, the British gangster film, as the heroine, a former pole dancer, attempts to better herself in life by transporting a mysterious, but clearly valuable, briefcase for her boss (Loyd-Holmes). A story that plays out amidst all the scenes of topless pole dancing, geezers being worked over with a drill, and liberal uses of ‘wanker’ and ‘fackin’’ that you’d expect. The film’s eco-concerns about the fracking industry, combined with the London accents, do occasionally make it hard to decipher whether characters are actually swearing (“fack’ off”) or discussing fracking (“fracking building”).
The second part of the film is effectively a one woman show, as a car crash leaves the heroine trapped in the wilderness and pinned under an upturned car. Various elements conspire against her getting free of the vehicle. A kindly rambler (Manders) turns out not to be her knight in shining armour, becoming greedy and violent when he realizes the briefcase she is handcuffed to is of value. The creature lurks in the periphery, and her only contact to the outside world, a male voice on the end of a walkie talkie, turns out to be a rival of her boss, who taunts her with the prospect of a violent death. Obviously intended as a character building, suspenseful bridge between the film’s crime and creature feature elements, this stretch of the film does unfortunately drag slightly at times. A directorial fixation with close-ups of foliage becoming unintentionally funny after a while. Wreck also gives Louisa Warren a run for her money when it comes to the amount of aerial shots of woodlands that can be crammed into the one movie. After a relatively uneventful second act however, Wreck then loons out as the creature comes to the forefront, and the forest is suddenly swarming with balaclava clad gangsters, resulting in the director’s beloved woodland setting receiving a new coat of red. While the creature might make short work of the gangster goons, it hasn’t reckoned on one woman’s resolve to stay alive… and avoid going back to work as a pole dancer.
I’d put money on Ben Loyd-Holmes’ favorite film of all time being 1987’s Predator, since he has so far acted in a (very good) Predator fan film “Predator: Dark Ages”, done the ‘running around a forest, shirtless with a lit torch’ thing in Carnivore: Werewolf of London, and here has the heroine do a cheeky variation on the famous “you’re one ugly motherfucker” line. The kind of Predator pilfering more associated with Bruno Mattei. As with other recent Brit horrors like The Mermaid's Curse and The Barge People though, the name of the game here seems to have been to try and capture the soul of some trashy, well thumbed, horror paperback from the 1980s. After years of British horror cinema gaining a bit of a rep for being stuffy, having arty pretensions and often appearing embarrassed by the horror tag, the 21st century has really seen the British horror film throw off its inhibitions, and embrace unadulterated pulp horror. Trust me, rarely has a character been more justified in uttering "what the fuck" than the heroine, when she claps eyes on the sort-of-Bigfoot creature in this film.
