American audiences can get a crash course into what the Brits lovingly refer to as a “video nasty” with commercial director Olly Blackburn’s feature film debut.
Part sexploitation flick and part formula thriller, “Donkey Punch” sets up three twentysomething English girls on vacation in Mallorca where they take up with four British boys who’ve been running crew on a luxury yacht.
A trip out to sea with champagne and doses of ecstasy lead to a videotaped romp of group sex that necessarily involves the brutally dangerous sex practice of the film’s title.
A girl dies as a result, and her two friends face off against the boys who insist on covering up the accidental murder by tossing the body overboard.
Blackburn has said that he’s inspired by Neil LaBute’s confrontational approach to satirizing male and female relationships, but the film works better as a stylish thriller than it does as a discourse on the sexual sensibilities of freewheeling youth.
If there’s cautionary moral here it’s that a girl should never introduce herself to a prospective lover as “hardcore.”
First things first.
(Magnet) Rated R. 95 mins.
