The most extraordinary aspect of Donkey Punch isn’t how blatantly derivative it is of the ‘we’ve got a body – now what?’ premise, but the total ineptitude of the film’s scriptwriters in establishing a tight series of twists and turns for characters that remain, straight on ‘til morning, as flat as cardboard.

Director/co-writer Olly (Oliver) Blackburn knows how to exploit his attractive cast, and the film’s opening third is filled with flattering headshots, bodyshots, curves, and wide panoramic displays of the Spanish coastal resort, as well as elegant compositions of the gorgeous boat on which three girls travel and trip out with four sex-starved jocks (including Cry_Wolf's Julian Morris). Nanu Segal’s cinematography is the film’s real attraction, with beautifully saturated colours for the exterior shots, and moody, almost translucent colour shades for the boat’s interior, where most of the drama erupts.

After an emphasis on electronica songs, François Eudes’ (Haute tension, A l’interieur) understated score pops up now and then, but it lacks a graveness and complexity that would’ve boosted (albeit marginally) the massive weaknesses of the film’s closing scenes.

Blackburn’s forte seems to lie in knowing what images are the most stimulating for audiences: there’s a fascinating balance of close-ups and wide shots that give the film’s first third a dreamy quality, and Blackburn knows his target audience of young guys and girls will appreciate a specific emphasis on nudity, so the early scenes form a slow tease towards the big cabin orgy where two girls (Sian Breckin, and Dead Set’s Jaime Winstone) ping pong between girl-girl and boy-girl touching &  boffing, before a third jock steps in and, in a moment of peer pressure/over-zealousness, smacks Breckin’s neck (the titular donkey punch), and kills her instantly.

The accidental death of a girl among the four big dicks is anything but new. Peter Berg’s Very Bad Things (1998) was centered around a bunch of goofballs trying to keep a lock and key on the truth about one of their own accidentally killing a hooker during a Vegas bachelor party, and in Stag (1997), the plot dealt with a group of dicks who can’t decide what to do with an exotic dancer after her partner is killed in an acrobatic stunt.

Donkey Punch also involves innocent women peer pressured into denying a tragedy and bullied into a state of trauma – or at least that’s what Blackburn and co-writer David Bloom were aiming for as an explanation as to why the surviving chicks don’t agree to the dicks’ terms so they can get to shore and then run fast to the police.

In Dead Calm (1989), director Phillip Noyce milked the power struggle between a mentally warped stud and a wife trying to rescue her husband from a sinking sail ship; no matter how often there was a chase or some head-butting, the dynamics between the two foes was always in a state of flux. The stud progressed from a panic-stricken survivor to a paranoid loon, and then forced upon his captive a bizarre state of dating normalcy, during which the wife watched and waited for the right moments to arm herself and be ready for an all-out assault.

Blackburn just seems to run into his own ‘now what?’ quandary after the fatal punch is given to the victim; besides one girl (Nichola Burley) who’s getting over a cheating boyfriend (hence the reason for the Spanish trip) and her initial bonding with a sympathetic jock, none of the characters ever evolve. No one is memorable, no one seems to have any semblance of a past, and the film’s remaining two-thirds consists of human stick figures discussing, threatening, and occasionally maiming each other until there’s one survivor.

Worse, the idiocy of the women is lower than the men; they have no brains, no will to survive, no self-defence skills, sense of psychological warfare against their aggressors, and they consistently make dumb-ass decisions that show how the screenwriters couldn’t conceive of any original conflicts.

Besides ideas from Dead Calm (the boat’s engine keys moving from person to person) and Shallow Grave (twisting an embedded knife in a former buddy to extract the location of an important object) – Blackburn also has one of the women commit suicide from some overwhelming sense of guilt or anguish from a nasty hands-on kill; her death is laughably illogical, and Blackburn has her recoil from the camera mimicking Ripley’s own self-kill in the finale of Alien 3: same facial expression, same Christ-pose, same tempo as the girl falls slowly into the ocean.

There’s also a sublime laziness that dominates the writing, and it’s most evident in a short-lived escape the two girls attempt in a dinghy. Lacking a motor, the two drift for a while, even though Blackburn’s camera lens picks up a set of rowing sticks on the floor. Rather than disappear into the night’s blackness and evade the dicks, one of the girls attempts to light a flare – all within a few hundred meters of the yacht. Naturally, they drift back towards the guys, and become hostages again.

If you were to excise all the scenes of the husband trapped on the sail ship in Dead Calm, Noyce’s film would still have enough gripping tension to sustain the film to the end, and that’s from drama that was compacted into one set: a small sailboat. Blackburn had a yacht, but the extra square footage was rendered useless by having too large of a cast; there’s just too many bodies standing around, and too many to eliminate to reach the climactic goal of a sole survivor.

Either way, beyond a dreamy opening third, Donkey Punch is an utter bore.

© 2009 Mark R. Hasan