Title: Paintball
Starring: Brendan Mackey, Jennifer Matter, Patrick Regis, and Iaione Perez
Directed By: Daniel Benmayor
Writer: Mario Schoendorff
Running Time: 90 minutes
Released: March 2010
Certificate: 15
The film stars Brendan Mackey as David, Jennifer Matter as Anna, Patrick Regis as Eric and Iaione Perez as Iris, they are four of a team of paintballers that go to a 48 hour paintball game. They are the green team. Their opponents, the orange team, soon have them pinned down but suddenly the shooting stops and the orange team is gone. Not long after one of the green team is shot, but not by a paint pellet, by a real bullet. And so the real game begins. Is there a psycho on the loose, or is it something more organised and deadly? Who will survive?
You might think at first glance that you simply don’t care who survives. It is just another horror film – stalk and slash. But you’d be wrong. This is actually a pretty decent film. It is a very effective horror/thriller, in the way that it has been directed and in the way it has been shot.
Director, Daniel Benmayor actually deserves some real praise for this film. Instead of over-directing his actors it is clear that he let them get on with it. I suppose to some extent this sort of film, with pretty much real, if choreographed, paintball fights are happening, then you have to let the action flow. But it’s clear that Benmayor let the camera run and run to sequences of up to ten minutes at a time. It shows in the fact that the film has a very real, genuine feel to it.
The plot is a little less credit-worthy, to be honest it’s fairly obvious from the beginning what is happening and what is going to happen. We’ve seen this sort of film before. But that’s not to say that Paintball doesn’t have a few new tricks up its sleeve. There is a hell of a lot of swearing but that’s pretty realistic, I think, given the circumstances. As for the sort of gross-out horror or gore that you might expect with this sort of film, it is not really too over the top, although there are a few moments when the squeamish may wish to look away.
All in all, Paintball is definitely worth a shot.
