Jackson Booth-Millard
I was expecting a scary movie with a masked killer stalking a deaf woman, but that is another film with exactly the same title, but I went along with it anyway, directed by Mark Tonderai (House at the End of the Street). Basically Zakes Abbot (Waterloo Road's William Ash) and his girlfriend Beth (In the Club's Christine Bottomley) are driving on a rainy night on the M1 motorway, both are tired, irritable, and bickering continuously about their fragile relationship. Beth is eager to tell Zakes she cheated on him, but cannot find the right moment, she falls asleep in the passenger seat, moments later Zakes misses an exit, carelessly cuts up a large white truck, skids in the road and barely avoids a collision. The truck violently overtakes Zakes, before both vehicles stop for traffic, as the truck stops, the tailgate flips open, revealing a naked woman bound and bloodied in a cage, screaming for help, before Zakes can get closer, the door is slammed shut. Zakes panics and wakes Beth up to tell her what he saw, they immediately call the police, but the truck's licence plate is covered by dirt, so they describe the truck and where they are. When they stop again for traffic, Zakes gets out of the car to take a photo inside the truck, but he and Beth argue when he refuses to get any more involved with the situation. Stopping at the next service station, Beth officially breaks up with Zakes and walks away, she calls her friend to come and collect her, believing she will change her mind, Zakes waits for her in the car. Then Zakes sees the large white truck pull up, he watches the driver (The Living Daylights' Andreas Wisniewski, whose face is never seen), a man in a dark, hooded jacket, get out and go inside. Zakes follows minutes later to look for Beth, but she is missing, he gets panicked and goes looking in the ladies' toilets, where two security officers throw him out and do not his explanation. Zakes then finds Beth's necklace in the car park, he believes she has been taken by the man in the truck, but his car wheels have been slashed by a group of rowdy football fans, so Zakes steals a car from the station and follows after the truck. Meanwhile, one of the security guards decides to watch the CCTV to see if Zakes was telling the truth, he sees Beth in the footage, but he is killed by the other security guard before he can do anything, the other guard is associated with the kidnapping. Zakes finds a truck stop, it contains many identical trucks, a police car arrives, Zakes is handcuffed and arrested for trespassing, he explains what is going and begs the officer to help him, the officer agrees to check the trucks, but he is attacked and killed. Zakes escapes from the car, he runs through the woods with the man following him, he returns to the service station, but he cannot call the police, he is now believed to be a criminal, so he steals another car and returns to the truck stop. Zakes parks and stops to catch his breath, suddenly a bloody woman comes to the window, claiming she was kidnapped, he lets her in the car, he says he needs her help to find her girlfriend, but his phone battery dies, so he drives to a farmhouse he saw to call for help, now he has a witness to back up his story. The elderly couple in the farmhouse let them in cautiously, the woman Zakes picked up offers to call the police, but she cuts the line, revealing herself to be part of the kidnap, she calls the hooded man, kills the elderly couple, and then attacks Zakes. Zakes wakes with his hands nailed to the floorboards, he realises the woman is not who she said she was, he manages to get himself free before she can kill him, he stabs her in the eye with one of the nails. Bleeding and exhausted, Zakes takes the woman's mobile phone and heads back to the truck site, he uses the elderly couple's dog to trigger the security flood lights, while the truck driver kills the dog offscreen and the coast is clear, Zakes gets inside before the security system is reactivated. Zakes finds Beth chained outside in a cage, she tells him the man has the keys, he quietly goes inside the shedhouse, where he finds several other women locked up and gagged, begging for help, they are being used for human trafficking. Zakes grabs the keys from the man's clothes and returns to Beth to help her escape, promising to come back for the others, the man realises someone is hiding on site, he calls the woman's phone, which Zakes has on him, the man follows the ringing. However Zakes has hidden the phone on the seat of an empty truck, he is hiding in a forklift truck, the man steps in the right spot, and Zakes pushes a button in the crane to release a heavy load container, the man is crushed to death, Zakes runs back to help Beth, she has already released herself, the two reunite and sob with relief. Also starring The Trip's Claire Keelan as Wendy, Trainspotting's Stuart McQuarrie as Thorpe, Robbie Gee as Chimponda, Peter Wyatt as Mr. Coates and Brazil's Sheila Reid as Mrs. Coates. You can tell this film is low-budget, it is a fairly simple format, a "curiosity killed the cat" situation, with a sulky but likable lead trying to save his girlfriend from a nasty unseen truck driver, similar in ways to the Spielberg movie Duel, it is pretty slow the majority of the time, but it does get tense just enough to keep it interesting, a reasonable thriller. Okay!
Spikeopath
Hush is written and directed by Mark Tonderai and stars William Ash, Christine Bottomley, Claire Keelan and Stuart McQuarrie. Music is by Theo Green and cinematography by Philipp Blaubach.Warring young couple Zakes (Ash) and Beth (Bottomley) are driving up a dark and rain-soaked M1, when all of a sudden a grime covered truck swerves in front of them and the tail-gate lifts briefly to reveal a caged woman in the back. It signals the start of a fight for survival for the pair of them......The setting is suitably bleak, anyone who has had cause to be on a rainy British motorway at night knows how mind-numbing it can be. Even the stops at the service stations serve as mundane experiences, where the staff are on auto-pilot and other patrons are zombie like in the banality of their routines. Into the fray are a young couple who are on the cusp of breaking up (though Zakes in that macho way is ignorant to this fact), this is where Hush manages to rise above merely being a horror picture cobbled together from bits of other genre pictures. It examines how a fractured relationship reacts to a terrifying reality thrust into their lives, and with barely half a dozen principal characters in the story, this clearly isn't going to be a psycho truck driver movie that sees the antagonist offing a number of dim-wits with gory care-free abandon.Director Tonderai has done an impressive job with such limited resources, there's a realistic tense atmosphere brought out by the low budget. His staging of certain scenes really grab the attention, with a container base set cat and mouse sequence of events truly breath holding stuff. He doesn't compromise the pace of the movie with pointless filler, it's a standard three tiered horror structure (meet the principals/put them in peril/do or die finale), but the film always remains honest to its core ideas, with Zakes reacting to his various predicaments in a way that is not beyond the realms of reality. There's also some nice camera touches (under carriage tracking shot) and smart use of appliances (light sensors), so why is Hush not more loved and lauded?Fact is, is that hardened horror fans from the last twenty years will not be able to get away from that old familiar feeling of deja vu. From the cat and mouse on asphalt core story, to scenes such as a toilet hide out, there's territory that has been well trodden in better movies. There's a couple of twists, one that genuinely surprises, but one which is so telegraphed it annoys greatly. Then there is the use of the hand-held camera, which has become a staple requirement, it seems, of fledgling horror directors. Here it is used to dizzying great lengths, so much so it grows tiresome entering the last third and had this particular viewer wondering if the contents of his stomach was about to unload! There's also, perhaps inevitably, some implausibilities that are likely to test the patience of some.Undeniably it has flaws and struggles to shake them off at times, but the good far outweighs the bad here. And given the small budget and fresh ideas the writer/director puts into what is becoming a stagnated formula, Hush is actually something of a small triumph and well worth seeking out if you are stuck for a tension pumped thriller. 7/10
RickHarvey
Motorways can be a eerie and lonely place to be when driving late one night. So the concept of the film , that being a trucker kidnapping women on motorways, was a good place to set an horror film. You got the dry deserts of Texas for TCM, and the dry deserts of Australia for wolf creek and now you got the empty motorways and services stops of Britain.The first half an hour of the film I rather enjoyed, the atmosphere was well created . The acting from William ash wasn't all to great, either was the dialogue seeing that the first half an hour mainly consists of an Eastenders type argument. Most horrors today can put me to sleep but Hush managed to keep me awake, this is probably because of the location they used , one that I am so used to . But the problem was that it didn't leave me with a satisfying feeling when it finished. What I watched was a bloke going out on a rescue mission for an hour. There were many unanswered questions such as , what was the killer doing with the girls?, why he captured them? Who the bloke at the store? If we knew why, then there would be more depth in the film, giving you more a disturbing creation. Also there were to many clichés . I know the horror genre is the hardest to reinvent, but can the director and writers please try and come up with new ideas . Also , what was up with the shaking effect when having a conversation at a table. It was very distracting but as soon as they get up and walk, the camera is locked, no movement whatsoever. There probably a meaning behind this ( I hope ) The plot was simple , not that this is bad as films such as Halloween have simple plots. But unlike Halloween , it failed to capture you into the situation of what the character was facing. Overall it was blunt and poorly delivered. Not one I'll watch again or even bring up in a conversation
