There are horror movies that walk the viewer through their deepest fears, others that use the genre to explore broader social issues and anxieties, and others that are just about thrill rides and LOLs. And then there is silly, sadistic trash like this: a micro-budget ripoff of cannibal-killer franchise The Hills Have Eyes, its lousy sequels and suchlike. It even features an actor from the original 1977 Hills’ cast: Susan Lanier here plays Martha, a blowsy barmaid with a taste for human flesh. But Hills at least attempted to craft some sort of backstory for its mayhem; Martha and her skeezy friends’ tastes are just a given, as if encountering cannibals is just one of the hazards of the boating life, like sharks or equipment failure.
The lambs to this slaughter are a quintet of mostly stupid young people in their 20s, who get together for partying purposes on the yacht of rich boy Chad (Zachary Roosa). Passengers include Chad’s permanently bikini-clad girlfriend Dana (Meghan Carrasquillo), stag buddy Franklin (Jamal R Averett), and lesbian couple Brandy (Amy Byrd) and Jess (Caitlin Rose). Yards of cocaine are snorted, gallons of booze consumed and makeouts embarked on as teasers for the film’s real idea of fun: putting the young’uns at the mercy of the tattooed boatyard body-eaters, who bring them ashore when the yacht runs out of gas at sea.
In the end, this isn’t anywhere near as gory as the Hills films at their worst, but there’s something much more dispiriting about The Boatyard’s pointlessness, its lack of wit, empathy, or basic film-making skill. The acting achieves such a finely tuned pitch of atrociousness it’s impossible to endure.
• The Boatyard is on digital platforms from 22 September.
