Olly Blackburn’s sexy thriller Donkey Punch premiered at Sundance earlier this year, and we caught it as part of Fantastic Fest, where it was paired with a “Hipsters Overboard!” Donkey Punch Boat Party on Town Lake in Austin, which sadly did not involve the actually tossing overboard of any hipsters. Austin has tight jean, rakish-angle hat-wearing party rats coming out of the woodwork, and it probably would have been a benefit if some had slipped into the dark water, never to be seen again.
The film is what you would get if you mashed Dead Calm and Open Water 2 together and sprinkled it liberally with heavy doses of ecstasy and trance club music. I know that it probably doesn’t instill a lot of confidence in a review when you reference Open Water 2: Adrift in the second paragraph, but that film should have had a title of its own and not been a sequel, because it’s not a bad Saturday afternoon thriller itself. Plus, it also involves a gaggle of young hipsters who shouldn’t be out on a luxury yacht.
The plot of the film is fairly basic: three London girls visiting Mallorca on vacation meet up with three boys in town who crew on a yacht. Before long, they’re all out partying on the yacht, now with the addition of a 4th boy who was keeping an eye on the boat. Liberal amounts of drugs, alcohol and music lead to storytelling, where we all find out what a “donkey punch” is, and then, of course, to some donkey punching. It’s fairly graphic orgy-style sex, which is why the film landed an NC-17 rating for the States.
Of course, the young and impressionable brother decides that he needs to impress, and he dishes out a donkey punch. This doesn’t really have the same desired result as the urban legend, and it results in one very dead blonde partygirl. The rest of the film concerns the boys trying to decide what to do about the situation. When they decide to dump the dead body overboard and say she fell off while drunk, the other two girls don’t take it too well. Suffice it to say there’s plenty of screaming, pleading, bleeding, and dying.
While the film doesn’t feel like a groundbreaking new indie or cinematic breakthrough, what’s impressive is that Blackburn manages to make this feel like an extremely expensive film, even though the budget was only a million pounds. The actors, pretty much unknown to American audiences, all give solid performances, although Tom Burke stands out among them as the antagonizing Bluey. The film looks gorgeous and has an ambient moody score that is reminiscent of Michael Mann’s Heat.
Blackburn has only directed three small films and an episode of a television series in the UK, however Donkey Punch manages to feel like a slickly produced studio movie with at least ten times the budget. If you’re in the mood for a Shallow Grave-esque thriller with a bit more sex and drugs, then you’ll probably want to check out this movie. Let’s just hope that it doesn’t give rise to Dirty Sanchez: The Movie.
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