Aussie horror The Furies isn't very original: it's a little bit Saw, a little bit Cube, a little bit Hostel, a little bit Battle Royale, and a lot like so many backwoods slashers. But despite this obvious lack of freshness, it still manages to be a lot of fun, largely thanks to its extreme gore, director Tony D'Aquino ladling on the splatter for his debut feature.
The film opens as two friends, Kayla (Airlie Dodds) and Maddie (Ebony Vagulans), are abducted, rendered unconscious, taken to a remote forest, and put inside wooden boxes. When Kayla wakes up, Maddie is nowhere to be seen, so she explores the surrounding area where she meets other girls in the same situation. Before long, Kayla discovers that she and the other young women are being hunted by a group of masked killers, part of a sick virtual reality game where their every move is broadcasted to members of an elite club via the special eyeball cameras that have been surgically implanted in their heads.
Kayla eventually realises that each abductee has their own assigned maniac who is there to protect them; as each girl dies, so does their 'beast', which leads to a 'survival of the fittest' scenario, where the girls turn on each other to increase their chances of making it out alive.
With the maniacs armed with a range of very sharp weapons (an axe, a scythe, a sickle, a machete, a knife etc.), the deaths are gleefully messy, an impressive array of gory effects drenching the film with blood, guts and body parts: one girl has her face hacked off, another has her arms ripped from her body, we get a superb axe in the head scene, and there's a nasty throat slashing. We also get graphic eye-ball gouging and several exploding heads. In short, The Furies is a gore-hound's delight.
If I had one minor gripe (other than the derivative nature of the plot), it would be that lead Airlie Dodds suffers from what I call 'Samara Weaving Syndrome': in other words, she has a really off-putting, warbling scream. Must be an Australian thing.
6.5/10, rounded up to 7 for IMDb.
