Donkey Punch is a thriller on the high seas, in the tradition of Dead Calm. A group of four young men
and three young women gather on a yacht for a wild night of partying. In the
drug-fueled revelry, one of the women is killed in the midst of coitus - while
being filmed, no less. Three of the men have some legal culpability for her
death, and just want to sweep the story under the rug, indeed several hundred
feet under the rug, in Davy Jones's locker. If they dump the girl overboard and
jettison the video tape, they reason, they can just say that the girl had too
much to drink and fell overboard.
In the real world, the other two girls would either go along with this plan
temporarily or go along with it permanently. If they truly want to support the
story, it would be for their own good, because they can't bring their friend
back to life, and a trial would reveal lots of embarrassing details about their
casual approach to sex and illegal drugs, and would do so on tape. If they can't
support the story in good conscience, they still need to pretend to do so in
order to avoid antagonizing the three men who might end up on trial for murder.
After all, they can always change their minds later, once they are no longer
under the thumbs of the men.
But this is a movie, not the real world. They women immediately start to raise a
useless fuss, thus causing the three guilty men to consider the possibility of
inviting them to join their friend on the sea bottom. Predictably, the four men also
develop some disagreements about the proper course of action. The three guilty
ones start jockeying and bickering amongst themselves while the
fourth lad, as required by the plot bible, has a conscience and doesn't want any
more people to get hurt. The boat is filled with firearms, knives, flare guns
and other objects which can be used as weapons, so everyone eventually has a
chance to threaten everyone else, and the film eventually becomes a gore-fest.
It is a British film, but many of the British critics disliked the movie
intensely, and I can see why. It is
a nasty one, filled with sex, nudity, extreme drug use, and gruesome violence. I
take the position that the film actually does a great job at what it sets out to
do, which is to deliver a shocking thriller, a Hitchcock-style film with modern
levels of NC-17 explicitness. It pulls absolutely no punches in either phase of
the film. In the set-up phase, the revelers talk dirty and get naked. In the
cover-up phase, the various acts of violence are handled balls-to-the-wall. I've
seen my share of screen carnage, but there were some close-up scenes in this
movie that had me looking away. Is that sort of graphic presentation a good
thing? Yes, sort of. As I watched it, it seemed real. It seemed ugly. It had me
emotionally involved. A couple of the deaths were pretty damned spectacular.
And the dramatic tension was racheted up to a high level and maintained so
effectively that I overlooked the lapses in logic.
In other words, I have to reach the conclusion that the filmmaker made an effective movie
even though I would never watch such a flick for my own pleasure and wish I had not
seen it. It may be nasty, but one must concede that it does deliver the lurid
genre thrills.
