Wild Country

I enjoyed this a lot more than expected, even though the special effects weren't great. I liked how the story was full of little surprises. Like when the priest played by Peter Capaldi, tells a local folk tale about cannibals. That's what I expected. Then it was a creature featue. Other surprises pop up too.

The acting was great too, and I really bought into all the characters. I also really appreciated that none of the characters acted dumb to forward the plot. They understandbly act like teenagers, but they're obviously doing their best in the situation they're in.

They want to stick together, but when the first character is picked off from the group by the creature. They pick up quickly that's what the creature was trying to do.

There's also lighter funnier moments in the film as well, and I thought it was obviously made with a lot of passion.

An attempt at what? I have no idea, but there's potential here. It's squandered pretty badly on a weak script and a terribly-realised monster.

The story itself has a lot of potential - a young (teen?) mother who gives up her baby for adoption later goes on a camping trip with friends and a preacher, and finds an abandoned baby. The friends are then all terrorised by a bear monster thing, kind of like the bear from Annihilation if it was imagined by early Doctor Who creature designers. A fitting comparison, really, considering the preacher is played by Peter Capaldi - the 12th actor to portray The Doctor.

The kids do an admirable job, really, and deliver their dialogue pretty well, and Capaldi is...watchable? I guess? I mean, he barely has any screen time, really, so it's hard to say...

The real 'star', though, is the monster...which is really badly realised. If they'd put in more effort with that, it probably would have elevated this movie by quite a bit.

We hear constantly that the British film industry is in crisis. Directors, producers and screenwriters, we are told, need to fight tooth and nail to get their projects on the big screen. We must, therefore, make every effort to support the domestic industry.

Watching Craig Strachan's bog-awful 'Wild Country' isn't just enough to make you lose faith in the judgement of British producers in allowing it to be made, it's likely to sap you of the will to live.

It truly is dire. The performances are wooden, the 'scary monsters' (allegedly werewolves, but more akin to giant moles wearing giant plastic Hallowe'en masks) feeble and unfrightening, the script tired, formulaic and hysterical in every way but the right one (it's not even preposterously histrionic enough to amuse, it's just a bad bad movie), the characters (if the term could be applied loosely enough to describe them) bland to the point of indistinguishability. Even the normally watchable Peter Capaldi is fairly awful.

I challenge anyone watching this rustic ruminance not to laugh out loud at the supposedly terrifying final 'shock'.

Awful. Unremittingly, irredeemably awful.

It could, of course, be a sophisticated ploy to encourage the Chav population to venture into the wild woods and be slaughtered, thus reducing the surplus delinquent population. That, I fear, credits those responsible with far too much subtlety.

As werewolf movies go, this makes 'Cursed' look like Shakespeare.

It is wonderful that a movie actually shows a woman breastfeeding a baby, but it's a shame that it was in this disaster. It was confusing and hard to follow. Throw in the bad acting and the hideous lighting and you have a train wreck. The ugly, fake monsters were the icing on the cake. With a budget of $1 million, you'd think they would be able to afford a bit more believable costumes/effects.

The basic plot of a girl giving up her baby for adoption, then finding an abandoned baby during a hike where she and her friends are then stalked by a murderous creature is interesting. It had so much potential with additional development. Unfortunately, this is where the director fell short.

I went to see wild country just over a week and a half ago and i must say i quite enjoyed it. its understandable that they couldn't do everything they wanted to do with the film considering the small budget of i think it was around about 1 million which is not a lot for a feature film. But apart from the kind of Ropey special effects and the pretty bad ending the movie as a whole was really good, with strong performances from Samantha Shields who was very realistic threw out the film unlike some of the other performances in the movie. Another person who really stood out in the film was the young Jamie Quinn who played the part of Mark, who at the start of the film came out with a few great one liners towards his brother and the two girls and made the part Mark a very believable character and shows that his career will not end with one feature film. Over all Wild Country is a very enjoyable and is a must see for all Scottish cinema lovers.

Barrie.