Kitamura’s follow up to The Midnight Meat Train and No-One Lives is a characteristically nihilistic piece of exploitation cinema that is sure to thrill some but may just leave a nasty taste in the mouth. The premise is a simple as the gore-drenched shoot-‘em up computer games that Kitamura seems to take inspiration from.
A car-pool of teenagers breaks down in the California desert. One by one they find themselves falling victim to a shooter who has positioned himself in a tree some distance away. With no mobile phone signal or means of summoning help, and completely trapped by the sniper, a small group of survivors desperately try to stay alive long enough for a search party to save them. But even if help does come, can it avoid the sniper’s deadly aim?
Kitamura sets up his shooting gallery with an almost bleak matter-of-factness. The teenagers are given little or no characterisation. They are merely bland targets for a sniper whose only motivation, it seems, is to notch up as many kills as possible. A long-drawn-out sequence opens the film, which sees nothing much happen except an attempt made to change a car tyre and numerous selfies taken on mobile phones; these are normal kids (as seen through the eyes of the middle-aged Kitamura), and it would seem they are in an apparently mundane situation. It’s actually a pretty effective ploy, denying any obvious suspense to the point where boredom is about to set in and the viewer almost gives up on waiting for something to happen. The idea is to make the violence, when it does come, all the more sudden and shocking because of it.
Make no mistake, Downrange is a graphic film: gratuitously so. Kitamura takes obvious delight in showing exactly what a sniper’s bullet can do to the human body. Having said that, one has grave doubts that what is intended is any kind of anti-gun message. More unsettling still is that the victims all seem to be female or ethnic minorities; with the girls and the black kid singled out for particular victimization by the shooter (and by implication the film itself). As we have said, the timing for a film such as this seems questionable.
Mid-way through, Kitamura and co-scriptwriter Joey O’Brien slow things down a bit in order to try to give the survivors some sense of empathy. However, the dialogue is such that the result is unintentionally funny, and the saccharine music score doesn’t help either. Bathos rather than pathos.
Eventually, Kitamura shows his true exploitation colours as Downrange abandons any attempts at subtlety (or intelligence) and heads towards a final battle that seems more suited to Predator than a realistic drama. By then, though, every new on-screen atrocity is more likely to be met with hoots of laughter than any feeling of genuine horror, as indeed was the case in the Celluloid Screams screening that this reviewer attended.
We could write off Downrange as just another survivalist horror, but conscience tells us that the subject matter warrants more serious treatment than Kitamura affords it here.
DOWNRANGE (CELLULOID SCREAMS FILM FESTIVAL)/ CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: RYÛHEI KITAMURA / STARRING: KELLY CONNAIRE, STEPHANIE PEARSON, ROD HERNANDEZ/ RELEASE DATE: TBC
