** Disclaimer: This rant includes spoilers so I strongly suggest that if you do actually want to watch this film and attempt to enjoy it by all means but you should probably stop reading this article. This is not designed to ruin everyone else’s enjoyment, but stops them wasting hours of their lives on films I perceived to being a bit poo. While I may not discuss the entire plot, there will be elements whereby any attempt to create a facade by the film will be shattered. You have been warned! **

While trawling through the various DVD titles under “horror”, I came across this film billed as “One of the most provocative and intense thrillers of the year”. It’s a British film and if other British horro films are anything to go by (28 Days Later, Dog Soldiers, etc) then this was going to be awesome, plus Kelly Reilly is in it. Sadly, this could not be further from the truth.

Why it’s crap

Eden Lake: attack of the chavs

Eden Lake has all the beginning of a decent horror film, a couple holidaying next to a secluded lake. While the potential for it to be a film with a bedraggled survivors running away from an unseen foe, much like the Jeepers Creepers films or Blair Witch Project. Instead the terrorising foe happen to a bunch of chavs. Straight away this has gone from having the potential to be a great horror film, into an insight of today’s fucked up culture of kids who are a bunch of anti-social c*nts, bred from a pair of irresponsible c*nt parents who inevitably create c*nt children. While some people who read into films deeply will say that this is almost aa satirical look at how extreme the state of today’s youth has evolved, I am watching from the perspective that I bought a DVD to entertain me and being a horror film, possibly scare me, but what is in front of me is pissing me off to the point that unless I see all the chavs eviscerated on barbed wire, I’m not going to be satisfied.

The boyfriend (played by Michael Fassbender) is a bit of a dick so the inevitability that he gets royally fucked up I suppose is almost expected and as horror films go it’s good that the cocky shit head with the hot girlfriend gets fucked up. But this comes into my putrid annoyance with “horror” films of late, which solely rely on shock rather than actual horror. The great horror and thrillers of the past made oyu think, not made you disgusted that someone is having their face slashed up with a Stanley knife. I doesn’t leave anything to the imagination and by the antagonists being deliquent little shits, makes it more like watching Panorama rather than an actual horror film.

I thought the film was picking up when the girlfriend (potrayed by Kelly Reilly) actually fights back and starts to kill the chav back, leading to a decent climax of a pretty mediocre film. You know how you have some films which have a climax of absolute retribution, well this film could have had it, except it chose to have a totally shit ending instead.

After evading the chav kids, who have been terrorising her for about two whole days, and seem to stupidly have the tracking skills of a Predator, she manages to escape by hijacking a van of an incoming driver. Rather than actually finish the film there the film decides to piss you off one last time and has her crash into a house having a party, with all the parents of c*nty kids who find out that even through self defence has killed one of their own kids, despite them gruesomely murdering her boyfriend. In the final scene you find out that she is trapped and the camera pans away as she is dragged off screaming, presumably murdered by the chav parents.

There was perfect scope to have a great ending whereby Kelly Reilly becomes like a vengeful angel of death, but instead us overwhelmed by the c*nts who brought up the little c*nts in the first place. It’s a carnival of chav c*nts and have no place in a horror movie. That and while most films delight in being controversial by having a bad ending, this was more to slap the viewer in the face by denying them any satisfaction. A film student my call this clever, I however found it shit.

Verdict

They should have done something similar to the end of Predator, that would have probably saved this film for me

This film only seemed to accentuate my hatred of chavs as anti-social oxygen thieves and how they continue to drain the resources of our country like a parasitic cancer, not which I thought the film’s intention was. It was an overblown, boring game of hide-and-seek in a huge forest which would be hard pressed to have Aragorn track the fleeing protagonist, yet this was accomplished consistently by a rabble of deliquent pricks chasing Kelly Reilly covered in more mud than a farmyard pig. Horror films are supposed to terrify the audience with a mixture of suspense and well timed horror moments. Eden Lake however seems to just irritate and annoy me to the point that I would have switched it off, but I wanted to see the chavs get some kind of gory retribution, which looked like it was going to but sadly never happened.

Eden Lake is another film which seems to have relied on sheer visual shocking material rather than perpetuate the suspense which it was quite capable of and with an ending which is purely designed to frustrate the viewer, has seen it magnificently plummet straight onto my “never watch again” pile.