Wilderness
Wilderness
Juvenile delinquents are sent to a small British island after a fellow prisoner's death, where they have to fight for survival.
匚卂尺ㄥ reviewedMarch 17, 2025
Looking to support British horror efforts as much as I can, I bought a film that seems to have escaped my attention. Wilderness is a 2006 British horror film directed by Michael J. Bassett (Solomon Kane, Deathwatch, Silent Hill: Revelations 3D) and with a script by Dario Poloni (Black Death).
Wilderness stars Alex Reid (The Descent, Arachnid), Toby Kebbell (Dead Man's Shoes, RocknRolla) , Stephen Wright (Highlander: The Source) and Adam Deacon (Jack Falls, Dead Set) and horror regular Sean Pertwee (The Descent, Dog Soldiers, The 4th Reich, Doomsday) and comes with the following synopsis:
"Sent away on a military boot camp, a group of young offenders arrive on an uninhabited island only to find they are not alone. A psychopathic hunter lies in wait, snaring his victims with imaginative booby traps, ravenous dogs & some truly deadly weaponry.
From the director of Deathwatch, horror and violence bursts onto the screen in this masterfully choreographed survival thriller."
I've mentioned it numerous times before but to my mind, stories of hunting humans have been a horror staple on the screen for as long as there have been movies. The film adaptation of Richard Connell's Hounds of Zaroff, which was turned into The Most Dangerous Game in 1932 could be seen as the granddaddy of them all, spawning numerous imitators from the poor (Steve Austin's The Condemned) to one of my personal favourites, Predator, going via Van Damme's Hard Target and to the box office record breaker The Hunger Games, based on the books by Suzanne Collins.
Wilderness has been described as "Scum meets Battle Royale" but I don't think that's quite accurate...
The film's initial opening does not betray the horror that is to come later and sets the scene nicely, establishing the hierarchy among the group and allowing the viewer to gain insight into the relationships and background to the characters.
The characters themselves are quite unique and most certainly not your usual bunch of spoilt rich teens that seem to populate every other movie in the genre and once on the island and things start to go wrong, the dynamics of their interaction with each other is a little reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. Stephen Wight's character is particularly loathesome and I for one spent the film waiting for his demise.
I have no idea how Wilderness managed to get a 15 certificate from the BBFC. There are scenes of dismemberment, throats being cut, disembowelment and other assorted nastiness that will keep gorehounds happy. In particular, Sean Pertwee's death scene as he is ripped apart by dogs is particularly brutal... and I am ruining nothing by saying this since a picture of it is on the back of the DVD cover and so, it comes as no surprise!
On that note, the special effects are largely practical and quite satisfying to see them done very well. In particular, I was impressed by the use of real dogs whenever possible. All of that said, some may feel that this is not horror but I would suggest that Wilderness with its level of gore, brutality and a psychopathic killer taking out the group one at a time allows the film to sit comfortably in the survival horror subgenre.
Critically, I felt little sympathy for the young offenders. It could be argued that some of them were victims of circumstance but for the majority of them, I felt no pity when they met their respective ends at the hands of the man stalking them. On that note, I feel it is worthy to mention that the antagonist of the piece made me think that this would be what would happen if Rambo decided to target a specific group and exact his own particular brand of brutal retribution.
The reveal of the stalker's motives, although I feel it came to early in proceedings, is quite satisfying and leads to a suitable culmination for proceedings; and even if the ending is a little twee, it does not detract from how much I genuinely enjoyed watching Wilderness. This film won't tax your brains too much but it didn't fail to entertain.