Donkey Punch

Building a sense of genuine foreboding from the off, Olly Blackburn’s debut film sees three 'up-fer-it' Leeds lasses meet a group of posh boys working on board a luxury yacht and agree to join them for some holiday hedonism at sea. As horror films of recent years have reminded us, it’s never a good idea to be a nubile young female if you’re going on vacation: you’re just asking for Bad Stuff to happen. And boy, does it ever. The booze and drugs fuelled below-decks orgy at the centre of the film ends with one person dead after an attempt at the titular act – a description of which I’ll leave the film to explain – and the group’s response spirals into an all-out, gleefully inventive bloodbath, a practical guide to Creative Ways of Killing People at Sea. It’s stylishly shot and makes great use of the confined-space trope to eke out the tension, maintaining a nicely fraught pace as the body count mounts. But, although there’s a certain satisfaction to be had in watching grimly unpleasant characters dispatching each other with every object that comes to hand, it’s ultimately all just a little bit silly. [Laura Smith]