It seems like just any other game of paintball, but someone is playing their own game with the contestants. As the team prepare to finish their match, they are unaware that someone is picking them off one by one, killing them with a large knife. When some teammates see their friend have their head cut off, they know they're in trouble, and it doesn't take long for them to succumb to the killer. A year later, and Bill Conrad (Stiv H) the father of Jen (Rebecca Scales), one of the players, is searching for her in the forest where she disappeared, frustrated at the police's lack of progress - but he's going to make a lot of headway himself today, just not in the way he hopes...
Written by the director/producer Steve Looker, Scarred is a shot-on-video effort that at first glance seems to be an amateur British horror in the vein of Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but which actually turns into something closer to Seven by the end, with its fiendishly clever psychopath running rings round the other characters. Made almost entirely on location in a picturesque English forest where it looks like they were lucky with the weather, it isn't particularly scary as you're always aware that you're watching a work made on a tiny budget, but nevertheless proves surprisingly enjoyable.
The pitfalls of amateur film making tend to be overuse of clichés taken from the bigger budget movies they aspire to resemble, stagey and blustering acting and the lack of money letting down the ambition. Fortunately, here Looker and his team have spent their money wisely and have ensured they have stayed within their limits while putting the cash on the screen. That's not to say there aren't clichés ("We can't just leave him here!") or blustering acting, but they don't get in the way of the action. After two attempts at getting the story going, the main narrative arrives when Bill meets a dazed young man wandering along the road towards him.
The man (Neville Millar) calls himself Andy and claims he's been in contact with Jen the previous day. He has quite a tale to tell, as we see in flashback, which involves him and his friend Jason (Shiv Nagpal) scouting locations for a film they are planning to make (write about what you know, eh?) when they get lost. The sensible thing to do would be to retrace their steps, but they are distracted by a van which drives by in a sinister fashion, and then by the site of the paintball game, which leads to a nasty discovery.
One thing leads to another and Jason is kidnapped by the man in the van, and Andy tracks him down to a makeshift house at the edge of a field, where he also finds Jen. To say any more would spoil things, but suffice to say murder and mayhem follow, with some amusingly bloody special effects and an impressive explosion for good measure. Scarred is worth tracking down if you like invention on inexpensive finances, and has a neat twist which renders the previous storyline more acceptable, in a novel kind of way. If Looker is given a higher budget to manage on his next film then this could be the reason, as it's well handled and ideal for fans of cut-price British horror.
