The new film from Australian horror director Nick Kozakis, Kick On is the sort of movie designed to play TIFF’s Midnight Madness and excite a crowd with a bottomless appetite for small-scale bloody spectacle. It makes no bones about being a genre film both in its desired effects (fear, disgust, rollercoaster-esque thrills) and in its adherence to generic formula. No issue taken — the template exists for a reason, and Kozakis ably delivers the goods with no interest in transcending its familiar trappings. Strong execution (to say nothing of the film’s literal executions) reveals the pleasures of the smooth, schematic design of films like this. For a while at least, this film that contains no hidden dimension or greater aspiration is tense fun. Then, like the doomed party it depicts, it takes a turn for the worse.
After a night at the club turns into a brawl, a group of four young people follows a lead on some cocaine to the apartment of a Russian mob boss’ son, Ray (Nikolai Nikolaeff). There, they party with the immediately unhinged gangster and his cronies, drinking and indulging in an array of drugs in the film’s protracted setup montage. Of course, the inevitable happens as guns go off and bodies drop cold. Ray’s goons tie up Eden (Markella Kavenagh) and her friends and hold them hostage in the next room, and the movie proceeds from there with their attempts to escape resulting in an escalation of crazy violence.
Confined almost entirely to these two neon-lit rooms, Kick On gets a lot of mileage out of its location. Setting the friends — and their own hostage — on one side of a closed door against Ray’s shotgun on the other produces tension that only lets up for surges of violence that explode with terrific practical gore effects. Other complications pile up — Ray’s father is a looming threat that the film will make good on eventually — and the ensuing chaos consistently entertains, but the recurring game of chicken between the two sides is the movie’s most cinematically fruitful concept. Kozakis consistently finds new ways to use the space, his inventive spirit driving momentum as much as the actual plot.
Keeping the sort of ultraviolence Kick On traffics in fun is a delicate balancing act, however, and a single misstep can easily call too much attention to the tragic events onscreen and quickly curdle what was a blast into unproductive misery. And as the film approaches its conclusion, Kozakis turns the dials a touch in the wrong direction. Though all dispatched characters are killed off in exceedingly gory fashion, some of the deaths in the back end are less heat-of-battle casualties than cruel execution. On the one hand, it’s a credit to the film’s dramatic stakes that it can sell losses this harshly, but on the other, once you’ve gotten beyond the appreciation for the macabre arts and crafts of practically blown-off cheek meat, taking this stuff too seriously is in conflict with the kinetic pleasures that drive the movie for the majority of its runtime.
In the best slashers or other survive-the-night style thrillers, the relief of still being alive at the end is reward enough. We don’t know what happens to Sally Hardesty after she rides off in the back of that pick-up truck in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the movie would be worse if it kept going. Kick On commits an error in having too much plot, as Eden, unbeknownst to her friends, has stolen a stash of money out of Ray’s bathroom. Her sister is dying, the only treatment being a prohibitively expensive experimental course. The happy ending rendered possible through giving Eden this unnecessary additional goal opens up some uncomfortable questions. If she does manage to save her sister, does that make the night worth it? Are her friends, drug-addled party animals, less valuable and therefore expendable because they’re not bedridden angelic figures like her sister? Fair or not, any film that places libertine debauchery this close to death has always invited accusations of reactionary politics, and Kick On is no different. Ultimately, needless complication mars an otherwise straightforward bit of gross-out fun, and that’s no fun at all.
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