Movie Review: ‘PAINTBALL’

I don’t know what I was expecting from this film and you better believe I was optimistic on the storyline that showed some promise. But it left me with a “I know I have seen this before” feel to it. This Spanish import in English is an action paced horror thriller that seems to walk a thin line between a day out for some good ole paintball fun and a hostel reincarnation with more at hand.

Pretty much from the beginning of the movie you are thrown in it. It starts off with a truck dropping off a bunch of people who have paid an extreme amount of money to have the best paintball experience of their lives. This group does not know each other and are aware of the forest they are in but have no clue where they are being dropped off. They are given their roles and assignments so they move on to play capture the flag. I wasn’t to impress with the shaky cameras from the start but it always gives you the feel you are there so after about 10 minutes I got used to it. When they arrive at the location of the first flag is where the fun begins. Now this movie clocks in a little over an 1 hour and 20 minutes so let me say this much to be honest the characters don’t matter that much and man where they complaining a lot. I like that sometimes because if you are a demented movie watcher like me you are screaming at the TV please kill these people.

So once they arrive at the location they are searching high and low for the flag and immediately get blasted by a flurry of paintballs that’s seem to be coming from the opposing team. Oh they are so wrong. There are boxes that are at each flag that are supposed to help them in each area but they soon learn from the first box which has a bulletproof vest in there that these things are actually set up to help them survive. Yes survive which become apparent when one guy puts on the vest and receives a live ammo hit to his back. Now the game has changed for this group and it no longer seems fun and that’s when the game truly begins. People will do almost anything to survive and that seems to be the overall point of this film as one by one the members get picked off in different ways. Cool kill scenes throughout the film starting with one members hanging upside down from a tree getting impaled in the head by a rifle turned stake underneath him by a thermal goggles wearing killer that we find out is being instructed to either let the players live through certain parts or dispose of them. This is where the Hostel element comes into the film. When one the players runs away from the pack she runs into a cave and notices that the floor is see through and there are people there watching to see her fate.

There is a club of millionaires who pay a bunch of money to watch the players hunted down by one serious bad dude that has a knack for killing people in various ways to please the audience. The crazy thing is there is one guy in the group who is so bent on not being taken out that he starts to do some killing of his own. There is no escape from this paradise either as the entire part of the forest is surrounded by an electric fence and a member from the supposed other team meets a fried fate trying to climb the fence. The gore in the movie was a little timid but it worked. I know this was an independent small budget film and the effects guys were smart to show most of the bloodshed through the eyes of the hunter so that the blood splatter wasn’t too cheesy because believe me when they did show the blood it was rather Velveeta. The ending of the film moved a little too fast for me but it was warranted due to how fast the film itself was going. I wasn’t a big fan of the last scene but the closing was smart and if you watch the movie you will understand why. The only thing that kept me up about this movie was if there was one killer where the hell were all the paintballs coming from. Oh well blood, gore, machetes, and paintballs filled with acid are fine with me and should be fine by you too. This hits the shelf on Tuesday September 28^th and I would suggest that even though I swear I’ve seen this somewhere its worth checking out.