Battleground starts as six armed thieves make their getaway from a bungled bank robbery in an ambulance, having shot two cop's dead at the crime scene they are in a desperate hurry to get out of the country & Mitch (Bryan Larkin) calls in a favour to get himself & his men flown out of the US but they will have to wait for twelve hours. The gang decide to head into an isolated forest to wait & try to avoid capture but during the night their van mysterious disappears, with over three million dollars & a long way to go they agree to walk & steal a car on the way but they are not alone in the forest as a deranged Vietnam veteran (Hugh Lambe) begins to kill the men one at a time using traps & his own sniper rifle. The gang of thieves quickly realise they are being hunted & must find a way to turn the tables or all end up dead & you can't spend three million dollars if your dead, can you?
Originally called Skeleton Lake (which is odd since there's no lake in it much less one called Skeleton lake...) this Canadian production was co-written & directed by Neil Mackay & while it's nothing special it's watchable enough in a routine competent sort of way, I've seen a lot better but then I've also seen a lot worse. What we have here is your typical backwoods survival film where some random character's are chased & killed in some remote forest somewhere, we've seen the setting before, we've seen the group of desperate men on the run after a robbery gone wrong before too & if I'm not very much mistaken we have also seen the deranged Vietnam Veteran who goes psycho before as well. As I said Battleground is nothing new & it's fairly predictable too with the only surprises of any note being how each victim is killed. The killer is given no motivation whatsoever other than he served in Vietnam, none of the character's have any real personality & are merely there to make the numbers up & get killed. At just over 80 minutes long Battleground moves along at a decent pace I suppose & it competent for what it is so as long as you don't expect too much you could do a lot worse than this.
Unfortunately too much of Battleground is nothing more than the various character's running around a forest, there are a couple of minor shoot-outs but not much action. While there's not much gore there is one sequence which is quite nasty & almost at odds with the rest of the film, the Vietnam nutter cuts a guy's head off, pokes his eyeball out with a scalpel, proceeds to slice his face & scalp off to leave the fleshless skull before putting the guy's skinned face mask on the table next to the skull. It's a nasty scene which as I said is removed from anything else in the film which is otherwise fairly tame with nothing more than a few gunshot wounds & blood splatter.
Shot in Ontario in Canada this is surprisingly well made with no hand-held jerky photography or quick machine gun editing so I have to give it some credit for that at least, are filmmakers finally realising these two annoying techniques are universally disliked? By me anyway. The acting isn't up to much, end of story.
Battleground isn't a terrible film it's just that it's not a very good one either, it's a competent horror thriller that you will watch & probably have forgotten about within a couple of days. It could have been better but it could have been so much worse too.
Originally called Skeleton Lake (which is odd since there's no lake in it much less one called Skeleton lake...) this Canadian production was co-written & directed by Neil Mackay & while it's nothing special it's watchable enough in a routine competent sort of way, I've seen a lot better but then I've also seen a lot worse. What we have here is your typical backwoods survival film where some random character's are chased & killed in some remote forest somewhere, we've seen the setting before, we've seen the group of desperate men on the run after a robbery gone wrong before too & if I'm not very much mistaken we have also seen the deranged Vietnam Veteran who goes psycho before as well. As I said Battleground is nothing new & it's fairly predictable too with the only surprises of any note being how each victim is killed. The killer is given no motivation whatsoever other than he served in Vietnam, none of the character's have any real personality & are merely there to make the numbers up & get killed. At just over 80 minutes long Battleground moves along at a decent pace I suppose & it competent for what it is so as long as you don't expect too much you could do a lot worse than this.
Unfortunately too much of Battleground is nothing more than the various character's running around a forest, there are a couple of minor shoot-outs but not much action. While there's not much gore there is one sequence which is quite nasty & almost at odds with the rest of the film, the Vietnam nutter cuts a guy's head off, pokes his eyeball out with a scalpel, proceeds to slice his face & scalp off to leave the fleshless skull before putting the guy's skinned face mask on the table next to the skull. It's a nasty scene which as I said is removed from anything else in the film which is otherwise fairly tame with nothing more than a few gunshot wounds & blood splatter.
Shot in Ontario in Canada this is surprisingly well made with no hand-held jerky photography or quick machine gun editing so I have to give it some credit for that at least, are filmmakers finally realising these two annoying techniques are universally disliked? By me anyway. The acting isn't up to much, end of story.
Battleground isn't a terrible film it's just that it's not a very good one either, it's a competent horror thriller that you will watch & probably have forgotten about within a couple of days. It could have been better but it could have been so much worse too.
