Donkey Punch is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with post-Richie British cinema. With its childishly lewd title and painfully overwrought, more-often-than-not unnecessary action/gore sequences, Donkey Punch could quite possibly be the worst major motion picture released in America this year, and it's only January.
The film begins as a mildly titillating story of a girls’ weekend in Majorca, Spain. Tammi (Nicola Burley) has just broken up with her presumably abusive boyfriend, and her friends Lisa and Kim (Sian Breckin and Jaimie Winstone) take her along on holiday from their dreary existence in Leeds to enjoy some Mediterranean sun and casual sex. This is all fine and good as far as premises go, but director Olly Blackburn (heretofore known for making bullshit short films) sees it as an opportunity for a laughingly slipshod attempt at character development. Two of the girls are given horribly rote dialogue, while the blonde with ample mammalian protuberances is left with often monosyllabic and always slutty utterances. Guess which one dies first.
The three girls from Leeds meet three fetching British lads, and everything in the film’s tone suggests that a light-hearted sex-romp is about to ensue. When the girls find out that the three men -- Marcus (Jay Taylor), Sean (Robert Boulter), and Bluey (Tom Burke) -- have access to a yacht, the painfully stereotypical party begins. Champagne and swimming lead to smoking crystal meth and what one of the characters refers to as “proper hardcore” sex. The film takes a predictable and downright squirm-worthy turn for the worse when we realize why Donkey Punch is titled Donkey Punch. Suffice it to say that someone dies in one of the most horrible yet unintentionally funny sex accidents in cinematic history. Adding injury to insult, Blackburn effectively ruins the Superpitcher remix of M83’s “Don’t Save Us From The Flames” by featuring the track during the uncomfortable, exploitive, and overly-long sex/death sequence.
Olly Blackburn’s first feature film is an interesting case study of what happens when style becomes completely detached from substance. The dialogue in Donkey Punch is almost without exception expository, and his characters are cardboard cutouts, serving as tropes of what I can only assume he thinks typifies young, modern, and hip people. When Terrance Malick cast a farmhouse as the lead in Days of Heaven, people thought he’d lost his shit. He proved them wrong with his beautiful homage to a bygone era of hardship and beauty. Blackburn casts a yacht in the central role of his film. Regardless of the yacht, it’s safe to say that he’s lost his shit.
Of course, Donkey Punch might very well become a cult classic in the way that Battlefield Earth has. Other than that, I cannot find any reason that would allow me in good conscience to recommend anyone see this polyp on the colon of film.
