Movie Review: Botched

This is very much the weekend of the off-beat gangster comedy, but as quirky as the Colin Farrell-starrer In Bruges is, it feels like the most generic thriller ever compared to the madness of Botched.

This is an Irish-funded but Russia-set movie that begins like any other heist flick – a veteran thief is forced to do one last job by mobsters after a diamond robbery goes badly wrong.

Unfortunately for our hero, but luckily for the audience who might be checking their watches at this point, this job ends up involving gun-toting nuns, exploding rats, a psychotic killer who believes he is the reincarnation of Vlad the Impaler, chopped-off heads and gallons of gore.

Horror comedy is a difficult thing to get right – do it well and you have Evil Dead 2, do it badly and you get Snakes on a Plane and 70 per cent of German crapmeister Uwe Boll's back catalogue.

On first glance the funniest thing about Botched seems to be that Stephen Dorff is able to top-line a movie in 2008, but as the film develops and things get more and more bizarre, the film hits a genuinely amusing groove.

It may be uneven, too long and with some jarring shifts in tone, but it's hard not to enjoy a movie that features disco-dancing Mongols and the high possibility that Stephen Dorff might die at any moment.

Clearly half the budget was spent on the Riviera-set opening sequence, since most of Botched seems to be set in one corridor, with a cast of Brits gamely trying not to mutilate their Russian accents. Actually, all these would-be Russians come off pretty well compared to Sean Pertwee, who despite only two brief scenes delivers a performance that should ensure a decade of hard-labour in the Siberian wilderness.

Botched is no Shaun of the Dead, but it's better than Severence, and first-time director Kit Ryan deserves credit for delivering a film that should entertain even the most jaded horror fan.