The plot: After a youth offender is driven to suicide from bullying, his bunkmates are forced to go on a team-building exercise on an isolated island. However, they soon discover that they're not alone.Wilderness is a pretty obvious mash-up of themes borrowed from various sources: the island location, lack of adult supervision, and sadistic bullying of Lord of the Flies; the man vs man conflict of The Most Dangerous Game, as well as its hunter antagonist and island location; the revenge setup of Friday the 13th and countless other slashers; the survival horror of Deliverance; and "Broken Britain" thrillers about despicable, violent youths. There are also hints of other slasher and survival horror films, but, unlike some reviewers, I think Dog Soldiers and Battle Royale are kind of stretching it. So, obviously, the themes are not unique, and they have been dealt with in other media extensively. What makes this film worth watching? For me, it wasn't the plot, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.I'm not a big fan of teenage slashers. I got my fill back in the 1980s, and Scream did nothing to reinvigorate the genre for me. However, I liked the director's previous film, Deathwatch, and I'll never turn down an opportunity to watch Sean Pertwee in a low budget horror film. The cast ended up surprising me, because I thought some of them did a good job. The characterization was at times a bit minimalist, but it was put the good use. Steve, the main antagonist among the teens, was thoroughly despicable and the sort of character that you love to hate. He was played to perfection as a violent coward, and it's difficult to imagine how this film would have been memorable in any way without him. Unlike Deathwatch, the pacing is fairly brisk, and the writing is straightforward. The gore is, at times, comically gratuitous, but it avoids devolving into the torture porn that sometimes accompanies post-Saw survival horror (such as Rest Stop). Still, there are a few good SFX scenes that might stick with you for a day or two.Overall, it's a fairly enjoyable example of teenage survival horror, but it doesn't really pretend to be anything more than that. There are some interesting ideas about revenge vs justice, punishment vs rehabilitation, and the culpability of authority figures in teenage bullying, but none of them are given nearly as much attention as the melodramatic teenage drama. The gore might be too infrequent to satisfy true gorehounds, yet excessive enough to alienate some squeamish viewers. If none of this scares you off, I suggest you give this film a chance. It's not great, but it's enjoyable enough.

The Wilderness definitely deserves more attention and the rating should be much higher than 6.2 (I almost ignored this good work for the comparatively low rating by only 5,000 votes). It is such a disturbing flick with a good premise: a bunch of juvenile felons get sent to an uninhabited island, which immediately gives me the vibe of Battle Royale and Dog Soldiers. In addition, the tension among the various characters was absolutely fantastic and they made their characters believable. Toby Kebbell's performance as Callum was outstanding but Stephen Wight as Steve totally stole the show. He was so sick that you prayed never in your lifetime would you meet a guy like him. The story was reasonable and intense. The cinematography was just about perfect. It seems that British horror films always deliver a chill to me not unlike an ice cube with the flavours of the hopeless and helpless inside.

I'm not really the outdoors type. Spending a weekend living in a tent, eating beans out of a tin and shitting in a hole I've had to dig myself sounds like pure hell. I've been to Leeds Festival and that was enough. I only went to Scouts once so that my mate Si could get a badge for bringing a friend. Camping in the woods seems horrific before you've thrown in the psycho-killers and mutants that dominate the wilderness survival sub-genre. Opening like a gritty seventies borstal movie, low-budget Brit-horror Wilderness evolves into a deliciously bloody fusion of Deliverance and Lord Of The Flies. Following the suicide of one of their fellow inmates, a group of teens from a young offenders institute are taken to an uninhabited former military island for a spot of team building. Unsurprisingly, they're not alone. Pursued by a psycho with a crossbow, what begins as a lesson in life skills quickly descends into a battle for survival.A typically British take on survival horror, Wilderness avoids the well-worn inbred slasher cliché, preferring an antagonist that's much closer to home. There's a reason why they're under attack, and as the survivors are picked off one by one, they begin to turn on each other as they look for someone to blame for the perilous situation. Soon they're fighting among themselves in a desperate bid to make it off the island alive. Laden with gore and wince-inducing death scenes (like when the boys' adult supervisor is eaten by a pack of dogs), Wilderness is a refreshingly entertaining movie. Brutally realistic, it amps up the institutionalised horror of movies like Scum to new levels. A tense, atmospheric outing into the dark side of the countryside, it sure ain't no boy scouts picnic.

Wilderness shows us that just because you're making a film about a bunch of teenagers in the woods getting killed…it doesn't have to suck. There's nothing particularly fancy about this movie, but it's reasonably smart, sufficiently gory, thankfully unpretentious and refreshingly unself-aware .The story concerns a group of boys in a juvenile detention facility in Great Britain. When one of their bunkmates is bullied into committing suicide, the head guard is assigned to take the teen convicts to a remote island for a character building exercise. While on the island, they make two discoveries. One is that a female head guard and two girl convicts are on the island for the same reason as the boys. The second is that someone is out to murder them all. It really is that nakedly formulaic, but these filmmakers take the time and effort to execute the formula as well as they can. The result is a fairly entertaining teen slasher flick. Well, it's really more of a teen skewering flick but if that's what you enjoy, you'll like Wilderness.Now, there's not any more depth to this film than your average kids-getting-killed movie and it's not making any wry observations about the genre or trying to be ironic or anything like that. It just wants to be a nice little horror flick. There's plenty of running and screaming and a few legitimately shocking scenes. There's even some furtive sex, but without any nudity. That's probably the only teen slasher cliché that isn't featured and professionally pulled off.The acid tests for this kind of script is…"How stupid do the characters have to be in order to get killed?" and "How over-the-top ridiculous is the murderer's ability to kill them?" When people who should be running away in fear always stop and look in that dark room or always fall and sprain their ankle fleeing from the killer or when the killer can punch through a wall with his bare hand or get stabbed and shot but just shake it off, those are the signs of a bad script. Wilderness avoids almost all of those flaws, except for an ending where the previously very smart, skilled and tough murderer suddenly become a stupid wuss. Oh, well. Nobody's perfect.Acting-wise, everyone in the cast gives fine performances. Granted, the roles are all broadly and obviously drawn but Stephen Wright and Luke Neal create a believable co-dependent relationship as two bullies and Karly Greene as the girl who comes between them gets to show her character is just as cruel and selfish as the two boys. Sean Pertwee and Alex Reid as the male and female guards also engage in a cute "who's got bigger balls" stare down.If there's any problem with this film it's that the only characters who even remotely resemble good guys are disposed of early on, and the ones that are left are either ciphers you have no reason to care about or bad people who, to some extent, deserve what they're getting. It's also a little odd that the ones who survive are probably the least interesting characters in the story.If you don't like teen slasher films, there's nothing special here to bother with. If you do enjoy that genre and would like to be reminded what good one looks and feels like, go rent Wilderness.