Carnage Park | Gory horror thriller delivers grindhouse shocks and edge-of-the-seat suspense

By Jason Best
( What's on TV )
published

Carnage Park Ashley Bell
(Image credit: Carnage Park)

Carnage Park Ashley Bell

As the title Carnage Park suggests, this gory horror thriller set in 1978 California is not for the fainthearted.

The hostage of a pair of blundering bank robbers, Ashley Bell’s final-girl heroine is gutsier than most of us, but she still does an awful lot of screaming after her captors unwittingly take her into the desert realm of Pat Healy’s sharp-shooting war-vet psycho.

Writer-director Mickey Keating (maker of 2015’s sci-fi slanted thriller Pod) appears to take as much relish as his killer in the gruesome violence, and his tricksy, Tarantino-like timeframe juggling is more irritating than clever. But he certainly knows how to deliver grindhouse shocks and edge-of-the-seat suspense.

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Certificate 18. Runtime 80 mins. Director Mickey Keating

Carnage Park debuts on Sky Cinema Premiere today and will be available from 23 January 2017 on DVD from High Flier Films.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46g3cKB1-70

Jason Best
Jason Best

A film critic for over 25 years, Jason admits the job can occasionally be glamorous – sitting on a film festival jury in Portugal; hanging out with Baz Luhrmann at the Chateau Marmont; chatting with Sigourney Weaver about The Archers – but he mostly spends his time in darkened rooms watching films. He’s also written theatre and opera reviews, two guide books on Rome, and competed in a race for Yachting World, whose great wheeze it was to send a seasick film critic to write about his time on the ocean waves. But Jason is happiest on dry land with a classic screwball comedy or Hitchcock thriller.