"Let's Be Evil" (Guardian 28/10/16)

Let’s Be Evil **

Dir: Martin Owen. With: Kara Tointon, Elizabeth Morris, Elliot James Langridge, Isabelle Allen. 82 mins. Cert: 15
 
Prolific Brit producer Jonathan Willis here attempts a teen-oriented tweak of the science-gone-wrong theme of his 2013 success The Machine, describing the doomed Posterity Project, a program that sequesters America’s best and brightest youngsters underground. While their twentysomething handlers uncover the project’s deadlier glitches, director Martin Owen applies plentiful visual gloss: a first-person shooting style necessitates intricate, Peep Show-like eyeline-matching, and the effects work is unusually sophisticated. Yet there’s no dressing up some desperately ordinary stalk-and-slashing, and the budget undermines the worldbuilding: ex-EastEnder Kara Tointon heads a roster of phony US accents, and while “Kids in America” gets repeat plays, surely nobody here ventured much beyond Amersham.

Let's Be Evil is now showing in selected cinemas.