A Most Atrocious Thing
Ben has been keeping a secret from his best friend Dylan, something that all the rest of the homies already know which he has to come clean about; college over, the gang about to move into a new house together and start the next chapters of their lives, Ben is not going to be joining them despite their shared plans and promises, having been accepted into a writing course in New York.
Ben, Dylan, Christian, Will and Matt on the road to Tooley Valley National Park, Bryan and Max trailing behind having slept in, the graduation trip is the last time they will all be together, time to make a clean chest of it, between the drinking, drugs, sleep deprivation, hunting deer and the chemical-tainted undercooked meat that turns anyone who eats it into a ravening cannibal…
A micro-budget comedy horror of dudes being dudes on the worst glamping trip ever, A Most Atrocious Thing has come from the disturbed minds of co-directors Christian Hurley and Ben Oliphint, co-written with Dylan DeVol and Max Sheperdson, each of them playing their namesake characters, with Will Ammann, Matthew Wassong and Bryan Taira bringing up the rear but failing to clean up the mess.
The script knowing, with the dialogue making references as wide ranging as Peanuts, The Wicker Man and The Blair Witch Project and the trip starting on the sacred date of Friday 13th August, the first annual Colorado cabin adventure of “trees, trees and more trees” sees the diverse group of slackers, stoners, dreamers and would-be hunters on a one-way trip trespassing beyond the multiple “danger,” “private property” and “you will die in the woods” signs.
A doomed bromance which knocks eagerly on the door of the homoerotic, Bryan and Max the only confirmed couple but the other boys are very much tangled in each other’s lives beyond just buds, Ben’s confession to Dylan that he is leaving less of a betrayal and more of a breakup, one which is interrupted when their friends begin frothing at the mouth.
The woods haunted by a hilariously cheap puppet of a red-eyed carnivorous deer, the cabin unsafe, no cell signal and the car battery dead, A Most Atrocious Thing revels in its silliness with gay abandon, the ensemble entertaining and on the whole likeable even as they are rapidly whittled down by the predictable consequences of their own actions as the trip becomes a trippy and bloody mess which costs them all dearly.
A Most Atrocious Thing is streaming on the Arrow platform now
